Mister Roberts (novel)

Mister Roberts

First edition
Author	Thomas Heggen
Illustrator	Samuel Hanks Bryant
Language	English
Genre	War novel
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin
Publication date	1946
Publication place	United States
Media type	Hardcover
Pages	189
OCLC	51762498

Mister Roberts is a 1946 novel by Thomas Heggen, based on his experiences in the South West Pacific theatre during World War II. Several characters, including the eponymous Mister Roberts, were based on real people. (See below.) Lieutenant (junior grade) Roberts defends his crew against the petty tyranny of the ship's commanding officer, while submitting transfer requests on a daily basis. Nearly all action takes place on a US Navy auxiliary cargo ship, the USS Reluctant, which sails, as written in the 1948 play adapted from the novel, "from Apathy to Tedium, with occasional side trips to Monotony and Ennui." Roberts eventually wins his freedom from the “bucket” and assignment to a destroyer, with tragic consequences.

Heggen and Joshua Logan turned the novel into a Tony-award-winning hit play, which opened on Broadway in February 1948. A book dramatizing the play, co-authored by Heggen and Logan and also titled Mister Roberts, was published by Random House in 1948. New York Times critic Lewis Nichols praised all three works: “As a novel Mister Roberts won a few million friends, and as one of the more highly regarded of this season's plays it has added a few million more. Now that the printed form of the drama has come out, there is no reason to suppose its progress will be other than in the same direction“.^[1]