Summary
For more than fifty years, legendary author Herman Wouk has dreamed of writing a novel about the life of Moses. Finally, at age ninety-seven, he has found an ingeniously witty way to tell the tale in The Lawgiver, a romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day. The story emerges from letters, memos, e-mails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, Skype transcripts, and text messages.
At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father's strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multibillionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses if the script meets certain standards, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including a reunion with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business.
Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than sixty years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the Moses movie when the Australian billionaire insists on Wouk's stamp of approval.
As Wouk and his characters contend with Moses and marriage, and the force of tradition, rebellion, and reunion, The Lawgiver reflects the wisdom of a lifetime. Inspired by the great nineteenth-century novelists, one of America's most beloved twentieth-century authors has now written a remarkable twenty-first-century work of fiction.
Summary
For more than fifty years, legendary author Herman Wouk has dreamed of writing a novel about the life of Moses. Finally, at age 96, he has found an ingeniously witty way to tell the tale in The Lawgiver, a romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day. The story emerges from letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages.
Herman Wouk was born in the Bronx, New York on May 27, 1915. He received a bachelor's degree in comparative literature and philosophy from Columbia University. In 1936, he became a staff writer for the radio comedian Fred Allen. He enlisted in the Navy immediately after Pearl Harbor and was posted as a radio officer in the South Pacific.
His debut novel, Aurora Dawn, was published in 1947. His other novels included The City Boy, Marjorie Morningstar, Youngblood Hawke, Don't Stop the Carnival, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope, The Gift, A Hole in Texas, and The Lawgiver. He received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1952 for The Caine Mutiny. He received the first Library of Congress Lifetime Achievement Award for the Writing of Fiction in 2008. His nonfiction books included This Is My God, The Language God Talks, and Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.
Several of his books were adapted into movies including The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar. He adapted the courtroom sections of The Caine Mutiny into the Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. His other Broadway shows included The Traitor and Nature's Way. He died on May 17, 2019 at the age of 103.
(Bowker Author Biography)
