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ALUMNI PROFILE
He entered the College at 16 and graduated at 20 after serving
as a staff writer of the Spectator and editor of the Jester, a portent
of literary things to come. Herman Wouk ’34 went on
to become one of this nation’s greatest storytellers, and he
recently returned to Morningside Heights to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
The Caine Mutiny. Wouk’s reading on February 7 at the Kraft Family Center for
Jewish Student Life had been postponed from last fall following
the events of September 11. The event was held in conjunction with
the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, where many of Wouk’s
papers are housed. Wouk briefly addressed the audience of several hundred, reflecting
on what he described as the unexpected success of his novels, which
include Winds of War and War and Remembrance. He also reflected
on his days at the College, which awarded him the Alexander Hamilton
Medal for distinguished service and accomplishment in 1980. “Columbia
is, in effect, a philosopher’s holiday,” Wouk said at
the time, referring to the title of a book by one of his favorite
professors, Irwin Edman ’16. “Philosopher, because you
came to grips with ideas and values that matter most. Holiday, because
it is exciting and alive and great fun. It’s a glorious school.
I owe what skill I have in the wielding of the English language
to what I learned at Columbia.” The son of Russian Jewish parents who emigrated from Minsk, Wouk
grew up in the Bronx, attended public schools and enrolled at Columbia
at a time “when great numbers of Americans, young and old,
came to believe that the capitalist system had betrayed the citizenry,
and that the whole structure was obsolete and doomed. We had a spell
of upheaval and agitation at Morningside; it took place in the spring,
as those things do. Thirty-five years had to pass before an equally
radical crisis in American life, the Vietnam War, would evoke in
Columbia College a comparable springtime storm. “Trustees are embarrassed at such tempestuous moments, and
alumni fret. As my hair has gone from thin and black to thin and
gray, I have evolved from a vocal demonstrator to an anxious fretter.
But now, as then, I am secretly proud of what these rough moments
indicate. My school dwells at the leading edge of social events
and of progressive thought. Its situation in New York, the world’s
greatest city, so wealthy, dazzling and racked by change, guarantees
this. In the long, quiet years, as well as in the brief troubled
outbursts, Columbia is — to use the vivid jargon of the moment
— where it’s at.” In introducing Wouk, who will be 87 on May 27, Dean Austin Quigley
called him a writer who “has displayed a variety of talents
— an indispensable gift as a storyteller, a capacity to create
vivid and original characters, a remarkable ability to depict in
evocative detail social and historical situations, a highly developed
sense of humor and irony, and in the midst of it all, a strong sense
of moral imperative, of the importance of understanding how human
beings make choices, how people invoke, abandon and defend values.
This is not the moral imperative of an ideologue who thinks he knows
what is best for everyone in all circumstances, but the moral imperative
of someone who recognizes with sympathy and humor the force of the
old phrase that if we do not all hang together, we will surely hang
separately.” Quigley concluded his introduction by describing Wouk as “a true son of Columbia, a man of great religious faith, great artistic talent, and great human achievement.”
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