The Caine Mutiny was published by Doubleday in 1951, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1952, and became one of the great American bestsellers of the decade — it spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list and sold millions of copies. The novel follows Willie Keith, a Princeton-educated ensign, aboard the USS Caine — a dilapidated destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific — as its new captain, Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg, progressively reveals himself to be paranoid, incompetent, and mentally unstable.
The novel’s moral complexity lies in its refusal to make the mutiny simply heroic. When Executive Officer Steve Maryk relieves Queeg of command during a typhoon (Queeg has frozen at the helm, endangering the ship), the act seems justified by immediate necessity. But the subsequent court-martial raises devastating questions: was Queeg really insane, or merely a strict disciplinarian whose subordinates refused to support him? Did the officers’ contempt for Queeg contribute to his breakdown? Is the military obligation to obey orders absolute, or does a commander’s incompetence release subordinates from that obligation?
The court-martial scene — and particularly the devastating closing speech by defense attorney Barney Greenwald, who drunkenly turns on the officers he has just acquitted and accuses them of destroying a man who was holding the line while they were safe at home — is one of the great set-pieces in American fiction. The novel was adapted into a successful Broadway play (The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, 1954) and a film starring Humphrey Bogart as Queeg.
Collecting The Caine Mutiny
First edition (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1951): Cloth binding, dust jacket. Pulitzer Prize winner.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $25–$60
- Signed copies: $500–$1500