The Caine Mutiny

The Caine Mutiny is a 1952 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard two destroyer-minesweepers 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 and other officers. 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. Plot summary The story is told through the eyes of Willis Seward "Willie" Keith, a callow young graduate of Princeton University. 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. 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. 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. Caine, an obsolete warship converted from a post-World War I-era destroyer. Arriving late, Keith misses his ship when it leaves on a combat assignment. While waiting for transportation to catch up with it, he plays piano in the evenings for an admiral who takes a shine to him. Finally galvanized after reading a last letter from his father, who has died of melanoma, Keith reports aboard the Caine. The ensign immediately disapproves of the ship's decaying condition and slovenly crew. He attributes these conditions to a slackness of discipline by the ship's longtime captain, Lieutenant Commander William De Vriess.