This image is the cover for the book Youngblood Hawke

Youngblood Hawke

A writer finds wealth, fame, and sorrow in midcentury Manhattan in “a tremendous novel…full of wisdom and pain” by a #1 New York Times-bestselling author (Los Angeles Times).

Arthur Youngblood Hawke, an ex-Navy man, moves from hardscrabble rural Kentucky to New York, hoping to make his mark on the literary world. His first novel becomes an instant hit, and he is toasted by critics and swept along on a tide of celebrity.

But as he gives himself over to the lush life that gilds artistic success—indulging in an affair with an older married woman and a flirtation with his editor, dabbling in real estate developments as his second novel brings him massive wealth and even bigger opportunities—he will soon find himself in a self-destructive downward spiral.

Inspired by the life of Thomas Wolfe, and spanning from the Manhattan publishing world to Hollywood to Europe, Youngblood Hawke is both a riveting saga of postwar glamor and a poignant tale of one man’s rise and fall.

“A big, powerful, exciting novel...Wouk has a tremendous narrative gift.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“As searing and accurate a picture of New York in the late 1940s and 1950s as Bonfire of the Vanities was of its period…And icing the cake are some marvelous Hollywood sections, including the best agent-in-action-on-two-telephones scenes ever captured in print.”—Los Angeles Times

Herman Wouk

Herman Wouk (1915–2019) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction. His works include The Caine Mutiny, Marjorie Morningstar, The Hope, and The Glory. Several of his books have been adapted into films and miniseries. Wouk’s early career as a radio comedy writer included a stint on the Fred Allen Show. He later became a naval officer after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Wouk’s novels The Winds of War and War and Remembrance delve into Jewish peoples experiences during World War II. In 1999, he received the Jewish Book Council Lifetime Achievement Award.