Herman Wouk (audio)

Herman Wouk left a successful career as a radio comedy writer to enlist in the United States Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He served as an officer throughout the war in the Pacific. While serving in the reserves after the war, he wrote his celebrated novel, The Caine Mutiny. The book ruled the best seller lists for a year and won him the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Wouk adapted it successfully for the stage as The Caine Mutiny Court Martial in 1954 and a successful film version appeared the same year. To date, he has written over a dozen novels, along with plays and non-fiction works on Judaism and Jewish history. Wouk spent nearly 16 years writing two monumental novels following a pair of fictional families through the actual events of World War II and the Holocaust -- The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Exhaustively researched, the books were praised by historians and loved by readers. When they were brought to the home screen in mini-series format, they were the most elaborate films ever made for television.