Herman Wouk (wohk) wrote several plays; the first, The Traitor, was produced on Broadway in 1949 and was published by Samuel French the same year. His most successful theatrical work, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (based on his novel published in 1951), appeared on Broadway in 1954 and was published by Doubleday the same year. Nature’s Way was produced on Broadway in 1957 and was published by Doubleday the following year. Eric Bentley, speaking of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, said that Wouk showed a gift for crisp dialogue that no other regular writer for the American theater could rival. The musical Don’t Stop the Carnival, a collaboration with pop musician Jimmy Buffett, was produced in 1998. Wouk collaborated with Richard Murphy in writing the screenplay for Slattery’s Hurricane (1949). Wouk also wrote teleplays, for The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988). This Is My God, which Wouk first published in 1959 and followed with a revised edition in 1973, is a description and explanation of Orthodox Judaism, especially as it is practiced in America. The volume was a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club selection and an alternate selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1959.

It is a peculiarity of American criticism to denigrate popular success in literature. Almost from the outset of his career, Herman Wouk was a very popular writer; putting aside prejudicial presuppositions, this can be acknowledged as a genuine achievement, for Wouk did not attain his popular status by catering to the baser tastes of his readers. Beginning with The Caine Mutiny, his books appeared regularly on best-seller lists. Several of his titles were selections of major book clubs. Wouk was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1952 for The Caine Mutiny. That same year, Columbia University presented him its Medal of Excellence, an honor extended to distinguished alumni. Several universities awarded him honorary doctorates.

Wouk might be described as a traditional novelist, in that his writing does not reflect the experimental qualities that are to be found in so much twentieth and twenty-first century American fiction. As with John Updike, he gives primacy of place to thenarrative element in fiction; he brings to the novel his own peculiar brand of rough-hewn vigor. At a time when conventional wisdom judged it bad form for a novelist to take a clear stand on moral issues—as if ambiguity itself were a virtue—Wouk consistently declared his moral position in his writings. This was not always to the benefit of his fiction, but by and large, his novels are stronger for his conviction that literary art does not subsist in a vacuum but is part of a larger moral universe.