Herman Wouk Dead at 103

Author Herman Wouk

There are so many news sources these days - and so much junk news about junk celebrities - that I miss more important stuff now than I missed ten years ago when far fewer sources were available to me.  The haystack is just getting so big that the actual needles hidden in there are impossible to find sometimes; that's the only thing that can explain my missing news of author Herman Wouk's May 18 death at the age of 103 (just ten days short of his 104th birthday).

From The New York Times:

Herman Wouk, whose taut shipboard drama “The Caine Mutiny” lifted him to the top of the best-seller lists, where he remained for most of a career that extended past his 100th year thanks to page-turners like “Marjorie Morningstar,” “Youngblood Hawke” and the World War II epics “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” died early Friday at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 103.

His death, just 10 days before his 104th birthday, was confirmed by his literary agent, Amy Rennert. She said he had been working on another book when he died, although, as was his custom, he had declined to discuss its subject until it was finished.

According to the Times, Wouk was never a big favorite of the critics, but I'm here to tell you that he did have his fans because the man knew how to tell a story - and a long story, at that.  I've only read three of Wouk's books (The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance) and that was in the late sixties and early seventies, but I still remember how enthralled with them I was and how I couldn't wait to get back to them every evening.  I must have been one of the "yahoos who hate culture and the mind" that critic Stanley Edgar Hyman said back in 1966 comprised all of Wouk's readers.  Stanley who?