The Legacy of Herman Wouk

Recently thinking about writers who were both hugely popular with the public and greatly acclaimed by critics but then largely forgotten I found myself considering Booth Tarkington--and somehow Tarkington got me thinking about Herman Wouk.

No one can deny that Wouk was enormously popular for a generation. According to the Publisher's Weekly lists his early novel The Caine Mutiny was the second highest-selling novel of 1951 and 1952 (which paved the way for the making and success of the Edward Dmytryk, Humphrey Bogart-starring film), while his next, Marjorie Morningstar, topped the list in 1955. Subsequently Youngblood Hawke, Don't Stop the Carnival, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance made the top ten lists of their own years (The Winds of War making the list two years in a row, in 1971 and 1972, and War and Remembrance getting the #2 spot in 1978, and the two becoming major event miniseries' on ABC in the 1980s).

Wouk's critical acclaim is more open to disputation than his popular success--but less so than some seem to think. After all, he did win a Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny, while even his detractors could not avoid complaining (as Norman Podhoretz did) "[t]hat Wouk should pass for a serious writer" providing more than "'mere entertainment,'" however much they personally think this stature mistaken. One may add that this is much more than can be said for just about any decade-to-decade bestseller on that scale in our time, all as one may be a bit skeptical of the complaints about those who regarded Wouk as getting less than was his due--in the main, conservatives who regard him as, in spite of his sales and his honors, a victim of an era of countercultural rebellion and fashionable liberalism dismissive of Wouk because of his championing of traditional family, religious, patriotic, martial values (the more in as their eulogies make so very clear that those politics are a very large part of what they like about him).

At the same time it is very clear that in spite of bestsellerdom and a real measure of critical acclaim his star definitely fell. If War and Remembrance rounded out an (again) extraordinary third decade of top ten Publisher's Weekly year's bestsellers, none of the five novels he published afterward enjoyed that distinction, while an admiring David Frum went so far as to remark that if "[r]readers under 40 know Wouk . . . know him at all," it is "as a name on the spine of a paperback shoved into a cottage bookshelf at the end of someone else’s summer vacation." Indeed, it can seem telling that Stephen King actually published a short story titled "Herman Wouk is Still Alive" in The Atlantic in 2011!

Still, I think it harder to account for the decline of Wouk's standing than was the case with Tarkington. Contrary to the complaints of his eulogizers on the right conservatism as such has been no barrier to enduring reputation, and indeed often a basis for such reputation, in a way, I might add, that extends far outside the classroom. Thus are the works of authors from Anthony Burgess to Ayn Rand massive cultural presences generations on. It would seem more plausible to argue that Wouk suffered for lacking the stylistic fireworks or edginess of a Burgess, while however much conservatives approve his world-view (indeed, one has to go very far afield indeed to find really critical takes on his work), it is the case that, in contrast with Rand's capitalism-singing exaltation of the entrepreneur, even Wouk's fans do not consider him a "go-to" writer for a particular message. Meanwhile the sort of sweeping historical epic so popular in the decades of Wouk's greatest popularity has long since fallen out of favor with the broader audience--all as where one could in the years in which Tarkington's reputation was declining attribute it to people reading something else, in the years in which people were wondering "What ever happened to Herman Wouk?" they had grounds to wonder, and doubt, that the people who were no longer reading Wouk were reading anything else.