Whatever one thinks of Herman Wouk as a fiction writer—and professional views have generally tilted against him—his fecundity and popularity are unassailable: twelve novels over sixty-three years (four of them emerging since he turned 69), two apologias for Judaism, four plays, and some fictional trifles. All told, he has sold nearly forty million books, and virtually all of his works are in print.

In the 1950s, Wouk produced the three works that made his reputation. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Caine Mutiny sat atop the Times' list for nearly two years and took on the charged Cold War issue of the rights of authority vs. those of personal conscience, finding for authority. Marjorie Morningstar, another commercial blockbuster, loosed Dickens on the Jewish Upper West Side of the mid-1930s and established that bourgeois ways and mores were darkly amusing but more conducive to the good life than those of Bohemia. The novel was also the first, as Norman Podhoretz pointed out in an otherwise scorching review in Commentary, "to treat American Jews intimately as Jews without making them seem exotic." And, finally, with the somewhat pugnacious This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life, Wouk entered into the lists of Judaism's post-war explicators.

Among his many other works, the World War II novels of the 1970s stand out. The Winds of War and War and Remembrance comprise a 2,000-page, million-plus word apprehension of World War II, brimming, like their avowed model War and Peace, with reverently reconstructed battles, madly intersecting fates, and scores of characters, historic and imagined, who witness all that requires witnessing. Wouk's next four novels—the last of which appeared in 2004—did not enjoy the extraordinary commercial success of his earlier work (or the serious attention of critics, which Wouk may have counted a good thing), but they sold well enough, while continuing to take on big topics: the Nixon White House; the place of Jews in a pluralistic democracy; the history of the State of Israel; and the science and politics (and romance) of particle physics. And now, in his mid-90's, Wouk has published The Language God Talks, which aims to elucidate the complex and fraught question of whether religious faith and science can live in peace.

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