Herman Wouk: Michelin Distinguished Visitors Lecture
- Public Event
With a Boon Companion, Dr. Kevin Starr
American author Herman Wouk was born in 1915 in New York into a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His work deals largely with moral dilemmas and the Jewish experience.
Wouk's epic war novels have been tremendously popular. Several of them have been filmed, including The Caine Mutiny (1951), for which Wouk won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1952. Wouk's two-volume historical novel set in the World War II, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), also gained success as a television mini-series and has been described as "an American War and Peace."
Wouk's meticulously researched novels have won admiration for their historical accuracy, and have been translated into some 30 languages.
Dr. Kevin Starr is the State Librarian of California and the author of numerous books on the state's history.
The Michelin Distinguished Visitors Lecture Series was established in 1992 by New York designer Bonnie Cashin in memory of her uncle, James Michelin, a consulting engineer, who had always hoped to attend Caltech. Previous speakers in this series have included architectural critic Vincent Scully, artist David Hockney, playwright Tom Stoppard, architect Frank Gehry, director Oliver Stone, opera singer Beverly Sills, poet Seamus Heaney, and author Michael Crichton. The purpose of these lectures is to promote creative interaction between the arts and sciences.
