Word: herman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...novelist's wife and an old-fashioned gold watch with Roman numerals and a heavy lid. For five years the watch has lain open on the desk while its owner listened to its ticking and wrote steadily, using the same aging desk pen and yellow lined pads. Says Herman Wouk (pronounced woke...
...Herman Wouk himself, The Caine Mutiny brought the Pulitzer Prize (1951), nearly a million dollars in cash, countless autograph hunters (whom he loves), countless requests for speaking engagements (most of which he declines), and several thousand letters (all of which he answered). But to Novelist Wouk, a cool customer in a superheated profession, The Caine is simply "Novel No. 3" (No. 1 was Aurora Dawn; No. 2, City Boy), and he does not worry for an instant that Marjorie may be lost in the undertow of The Caine's popularity. This unique assurance is typical of Herman Wouk...
Island of Normalcy. Herman Wouk obviously disagrees. To him, Marjorie is a story he felt he had to tell: "This person has haunted me for years. It's not a girl I was in love with. It is a lot of girls I knew, since I grew up in all this...
Like.Marjorie, Wouk was born in The Bronx, the son of Abraham Isaac and Esther Levine Wouk. Both parents came from Minsk, Russia. Papa Wouk started washing clothes in a basement, rose to be president of one of New York's largest power laundries. One of Herman's earliest memories is playing hide and seek among the machines. The Wouk family was "restless, like most New Yorkers," and while Herman was still a child, made four moves, from one canyonlike apartment house to another, all within what Wouk calls "that romantic, and much overcriticized borough," The Bronx...
Though he was later to toss a nostalgic valentine to his Bronx boyhood in his novel, City Boy, little Herman got off to a depressing start. He was the neighborhood fat boy, forever guzzling chocolate milkshakes. In street fights, "I was clobbered." But he had two powerful consolations: the Wouk home life and books. As soon as he learned to read, he would sprawl on the floor for hours with a tattered old dictionary, glorying in big words like anthropomorphism...