By Rachel Gordan
“Marjorie,” the story of a bedazzling Jewess on Manhattan’s Upper West Side who dreams of becoming an actress, was not exactly what critics expected from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Caine Mutiny,” although reviewers took the novel as proof of Wouk’s anti-intellectual, conformist point of view. Literary critic Leslie Fiedler called “Marjorie” “the first fictional celebration of the mid-20th-century detente between the Jews and middle-class America.” When Natalie Wood played Marjorie in 1958, it seemed further proof that Wouk’s was a story about, as Time magazine put it, “an American Everygirl who happens to be Jewish.”
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