Word: wouk
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Thus Novelist-Playwright Herman Wouk, now 44, who started out as a gag writer for Fred Allen, went on to write The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar, tells how he came to give a second try to the Judaism in which he was born. That "gamble," as he calls it, resulted in a steadily deepening faith and practice-Sabbath, dietary laws and all-which survived the rigors of three years at sea in the Navy and continued citizenship in the realms of gold. It also resulted in Author Wouk's latest book, This Is My God (Doubleday...
...combination--necessitates a meeting-ground. Someplace, literature must be taught as history and vice versa. There is some consensus as to when this is valid--as, for example, that the art of a Shakespeare can be studied as craftsmanship whereas it is more profitable to approach Herman Wouk as a statement of group adjustment; but the dividing line never really becomes clear...
...Jack Kerouac's bastardization of the picar-esque tradition, the hipster vocabulary, the mystic meaningless words attached to a generation, where motion is meaning and stasis is death. (I do not speak here of the book clubs, circulating libraries, paperbounds, and imported brown-covered erotica; Henry Miller and Herman Wouk bestride this cultural colossus, alternately sagacious and sadistic with their American public...
Marjorie Morningstar (Warner) speeds up the plot of Herman Wouk's bestseller, but the telling still takes a long 123 minutes. Though Marjorie (Natalie Wood) is deprived of that mad moment of youthful abandon with her lover (Gene Kelly), she at least avoids ending up with grey hair, suburbia and a stuffy lawyer. Instead she goes up to re-examine the summer resort South Wind, spends a few minutes staring at the still irresponsible Kelly, and decides to leave him and his world forever. "Say, you've really grown up, haven't you," says the resort manager...
...seems one more frantic farce that relies for its laughs on gamy subject matter rather than witty treatment, and that, when its back is to the wall, literally has the bricks come flying out of it. What chiefly seems odd in all this is that Herman Wouk should be the author. But as the show proceeds, it becomes plain that there is a message in its madness−that with every tasteless gag, Wouk is bopping whatever repels him as newfangled or decadent, including Picasso...