Critical Mass

Library of Congress Award: Herman Wouk

By NBCC


Herman Wouk, middlebrow novelist whose best selleers were based in part on research conducted at the Library of Congress, will read from his unpublished literary diaries on September 10 at 5 pm at the Library of Congress. The occasion: he is the first to be honored with the Library of Congress Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of Fiction.

Joining Wouk to read from his work: New York Times columnist William Safire, ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz, musician/author Jimmy Buffett, whose musical “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” was based on the Wouk novel. 

Wouk, 93,is the author of “The Caine Mutiny” (1951), which won a Pulitzer and was made into a play starring Henry Fonda and a film starring Humphrey Bogart; two other novels about World War II and the Holocaust, “The Winds of War” (1971) and “War and Remembrance”(1978), and “Marjorie Morningstar” (1955), the story of an Upper West side teenager who has a shot at acting in a summer stock production. His latest novel, “A Hole in Texas” (2004) (excerpt here), was inspired by the the aborted Texas Superconducting Super Collider project. Wouk reading excerpts from his work on YouTube here.