copyright 1951; International Collectors Library publishers, New York; leather hardbound with gilt decor and lettering on cover and spine; very good condition with unmarked pages; no dust jacket.
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The Caine Mutiny is the 1951 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Among its themes, it deals with the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by ship captains. The mutiny of the title is legalistic, not violent, and takes place during Typhoon Cobra, in December 1944. The court-martial that results provides the dramatic climax to the plot.
The story is told through the eyes of Willis Seward "Willie" Keith, an affluent, callow young man who signs up for midshipman school with the United States Navy to avoid being drafted into the United States Army during World War II. The novel describes the tribulations he endures because of inner conflicts over his relationship with his domineering mother and with May Wynn, a beautiful red-haired nightclub singer, the daughter of Italian immigrants. After barely surviving a series of misadventures that earn him the highest number of demerits in his midshipman's class, he is commissioned as an ensign and assigned to the destroyer minesweeper USS Caine, an obsolete warship converted from a World War I-era destroyer.