Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends.

First edition of this collection of portraits exploring the lives of key biblical figures. Octavo, original publisher's half cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the half-title page, "For Herman Wouk - in friendship, Marion and Elie Wiesel May 9, 1976." Herman Wouk was a novelist, playwright, and essayist whose career spanned more than seven decades and whose work brought the experience of American Jewish life to a mass readership with a seriousness and scope that few of his contemporaries matched. The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Caine Mutiny (1951), Wouk went on to produce some of the most widely read American novels of the postwar era — among them Marjorie Morningstar (1955), one of the first million-selling novels centered on Jewish-American life, and the sweeping two-volume Second World War epic comprising The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), which together constitute one of the most ambitious fictional treatments of the war and the Holocaust produced in the English language. Elie Wiesel and Wouk were genuine friends and mutual admirers, united by their shared commitment to Jewish memory, Holocaust remembrance, and the survival of Jewish civilization. Wiesel was counted among Wouk's friends and admirers alongside figures such as Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow — a circle that speaks to the esteem in which Wouk was held across the full spectrum of Jewish intellectual and political life. Both men approached the Holocaust as a subject demanding witness rather than silence, and their parallel commitments — Wiesel through personal testimony and moral advocacy, Wouk through epic historical fiction — made them natural and enduring companions in the broader project of ensuring that the catastrophe of European Jewry would not be forgotten. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Translated from the French by Marion Wiesel. Author photograph by Philippe Halsman. An exceptional association.