Friends,
Let’s raise a glass and wish a hearty and congratulatory Mazal Tov to legendary Author and Novelist, Herman Wouk on his 100th Birthday!!!!
Outside of our currently held Guinness World Record for the largest number of healthy Centenarians who are thriving at any of our Regency Nursing Centers, not many other Centenarians celebrate their 100th birthday by raising a glass to a new professional departure!
Except, Herman Wouk – 100 on Wednesday, 27 May – is about to publish his first memoir!!
Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author will discuss the spirituality and war experiences of the Pulitzer prize-winning writer, who wrote his first novel, Aurora Dawn, in longhand while he was at sea during the second world war. His time in the US navy involved him in eight Pacific invasions.
“I’ve lived to a great age, and for that I thank Providence,” Wouk said in a statement released by his publisher Simon & Schuster. “To the readers who’ve stayed with me for the long pull, my warm affection, and I hope you’ll enjoy the light-hearted memoir about my writings, Sailor and Fiddler.”
Wouk watchers will be interested to see how the writer’s own life intersects with some of his most famous work. He won the Pulitzer for his 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny, which topped the New York Times bestseller list for 47 weeks and was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart. Based on Wouk’s own exprience aboard a destroyer-minesweeper, it revolves around a mutiny during a typhoon in 1944, which results in a court-martial, and contains some hard truths about the ethics of leadership at sea.
“The navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots,” says Thomas Keefer, an aspiring writer and junior officer aboard USS Caine. “If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, ‘How would I do this if I were a fool?’ Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.”
Wouk followed The Caine Mutiny with novels such as Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965), The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). In 2008, he won America’s first Library of Congress fiction award, which was later renamed the Herman Wouk award in his honour. He was also named-checked by Stephen King in the title of a 2011 short story, Herman Wouk Is Still Alive.
Herman,
Here is to the next 100 years!!
