The Caine Mutiny

“As a modern sea adventure it is absolutely first-rank reading.” —Lee Rogow, Saturday Review

The novel that inspired the now-classic film The Caine Mutiny and the hit Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

Herman Wouk’s boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life—and mutiny—on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II. In the intervening half century, The Caine Mutiny has achieved the status of a modern classic.

“At last! A war story which gives you a rounded view of the way men at war behave…. Here you have a novel which can be read through like an adventure story—fast, straightshooting narrative that goes direct to the point with no weaving and winding, no waste motion, and no agonized soul searching… . The high point of the book, for me, is not the mutiny itself, thrilling though it is. Utterly absorbing is the court-martial…. Don’t miss it.” —Kelsey Guilfoil, Chicago Tribune

“The Caine Mutiny has the time sense, the sense of being hopelessly isolated and cut off from home, which every veteran remembers; it has the scope and the skill to reveal how men are tested, exposed, and developed under the long routine of war; finally, it has the slow-fused but inevitably accumulating tension of the mutiny which gives both form and explosive climax to the story.” —Edward Weeks, Atlantic Monthly