Word: wouk
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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...
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...
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...