Word: wouk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Built-in Engine. One night a week Wouk gives a course in advanced rhetoric at New York's Yeshiva University to a class of rabbinical students. He owns no car and no boat ("Possessions are disastrous"), but he does own two homes. In addition to the Fire Island summer place, he has a fashionable cooperative apartment in Manhattan's East 60s. He and his wife are homebodies; they love to read and listen to records...
Somewhere inside Herman Wouk there plays a permanent recording of The Little Engine That Could. He has at various times doggedly tackled flying, boxing, aquaplaning, and taught himself to type, play the piano, and do the breast stroke. When Wouk saw Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, he went home in despair: "You worm! You thug!" he raged at himself. "Get out of this business'" But next morning he was still in business, lifting the court-martial sequence out of The Caine. He wrote the whole play in "three horrible weeks...
Accent on Form. From Babbitt, to The Grapes of Wrath, to The Naked and the Dead, a generation of talented but angry men has been bending the ear of U.S. readers, almost suggesting that thinking men should secede from the U.S. Wouk is not an angry man. But there is more than artless optimism or patriotism beneath the surface of his stories. Wouk denies taking stands for or against anything, but the evidence of the books contradicts him. There is an indictment in The Caine Mutiny-not, ultimately, of Queeg, the maniacal martinet, but of Keefer, the phony intellectual. There...
These characters are not indicted because they are intellectuals, but because they are irresponsible. What Wouk is saying, in effect, is that if everyone acted like Keefer, armies would fall apart, and wars would be lost. If everyone acted like Airman, marriages, families and society would crumble. These are platitudes, but they are the platitudes (as Wouk has Willie Keith say) of "growing...
...Wouk, rebellion for rebellion's sake is an outmoded adolescent cliche. Friends find him a hard man to know, perhaps because he is without capacity for the sustained and often neurotic introspection in which writers often indulge. If all this makes him a conformist, he is willing to bear the tag, provided that the accent is on the second syllable. Says Wouk: "One must impose a form on life...