Wouk's ship Destroyer/Minesweeper USS Zane after repair at Mare Island, San Francisco, September 1943, Note forward anti-aircraft gun, and three smokestacks He attributes these conditions to a slackness of discipline by the ship's longtime captain, Lieutenant Commander William De Vriess. The ensign immediately disapproves of the ship's decaying condition and slovenly crew. Finally galvanized after reading a last letter from his father, who has died of melanoma, Keith reports aboard the Caine. While waiting for transportation to catch up with it, he plays piano in the evenings for an admiral who takes a shine to him.

Caine, an obsolete warship converted from a post- World War I-era destroyer.Īrriving late, Keith misses his ship when it leaves on a combat assignment. After barely surviving a series of misadventures that earn him the highest number of demerits in his class, Keith is commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve and assigned to the destroyer minesweeper U.S.S.

He endures inner conflicts over his relationships with his domineering mother and with May Wynn, a beautiful red-haired nightclub singer, the daughter of Italian immigrants, whom he accompanies on piano in their nightclub performances. Following a mediocre living as a nightclub piano player, he signs up for midshipman school at Columbia University with the United States Navy to avoid being drafted into the United States Army during World War II. The story is told through the eyes of Willis Seward 'Willie' Keith, a callow young graduate of Princeton University. The court-martial that results provides the dramatic climax to the plot. The mutiny of the title is legalistic, not violent, and takes place during Typhoon Cobra, in December 1944. Among its themes, it deals with the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by ship captains and other officers. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard two destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific Theater in World War II. The Caine Mutiny is a 1952 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk.

The caine mutiny 1951