Word: wouk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wouk relaxes with a martini and a long Havana cigar ("They are like lollipops"), plays with his boys Nathaniel, 5, and Joseph, 17 months...
...night late in 1944, when the Zane put in at San Pedro for repairs, Lieut. Wouk and a few fellow officers went out on the town. After all the bars had closed, one of the men remembered a birthday party being given for the boss of a file clerk he knew. "So we all barged in. I made a date with one of the file clerks for lunch the next day. All through lunch the girl raved about her boss, this beautiful, witty, talented creature. Naturally I went back to her office to take a second look, and I made...
...boss was Betty Brown, a trim, pretty redhead and a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Southern California. For Wouk, it was a clear case of love at second sight. Betty was a Protestant, but not a practicing one. She thinks now that part of Herman's appeal for her was that he made her see "that one didn't have to be a stupe to be religious." When Herman went back to sea, Betty Brown began studying Judaism, and a year later, on her 25th birthday, became a Jewish convert. Betty's Hebrew name...
Through the years on shipboard, Wouk had been pecking away at a novel. Aurora Dawn was written in an 18th century style as quaint as a minuet, but it dealt with a 20th century subject, "the contrast between the rat-race values of the radio-advertising world and the stable values of an Old Testament hillbilly prophet who gets mixed up with it." Wouk thinks of it as "a compendium of first-novel errors," but the Book-of-the-Month Club grabbed it. From that day to this, Wouk has pursued "the hard, borderline trade" of writing with monastic dedication...
...Wouk, a meticulous researcher,* tries for "plain style, clarity of expression, as I'm not a poet, and not a high stylist." He shuns obscenity in his books: "You don't use dirty language in someone's home. When a reader holds my book, we are in an even closer relationship than a guest's." Pinpointing his own faults, he says: "I overwrite. I fail to achieve the standard of excellence I strive for, and fall into mediocrity." He reads and rereads Shakespeare, but Dickens is his all-time favorite author ("He could create reality with...