''Don't Stop the Carnival'' is a 1965 novel by American writer

Herman Wouk Herman Wouk ( ; May 27, 1915 – May 17, 2019) was an American author. He published fifteen novels, many of them historical fiction such as ''The Caine Mutiny'' (1951), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Pulitzer Prize in fiction. ...

. It is a satirical comedy about escaping from New York and a middle-age crisis to an idyllic island in the

Caribbean The Caribbean ( , ; ; ; ) is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north, Central America ...

, a heaven that quickly turns into a hell for the main character. The novel was turned into a short-lived musical and later an

album An album is a collection of audio recordings (e.g., music) issued on a medium such as compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl (record), audio tape (like 8-track cartridge, 8-track or Cassette tape, cassette), or digital distribution, dig ...

Jimmy Buffett James William Buffett (December 25, 1946 – September 1, 2023) was an American singer-songwriter, author, and businessman. He was known for his tropical rock sound and persona, which often portrayed a lifestyle described as "island escapis ...

(1997).

Plot

''Don't Stop the Carnival'' revolves around the lead character, Norman Paperman. He is a middle-aged New York City press agent who leaves the noise and narrowly focused life of the big city and runs away to a (fictional) Caribbean island to reinvent himself as a hotel keeper. The result is a satirical tale of naivety, financial ineptitude, disaster and disillusionment.Don't Stop the Carnival: A Novel: Herman Wouk: 9780316955126: Amazon.com: Books
/ref> The novel takes place on the fictional island of Amerigo. According to the opening of the musical (a paraphrased excerpt from the novel):

Background

This book is based on Herman Wouk's experiences in the Virgin Islands in the early 1960s in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. The story centers around the fictional experiences of a New York advertising executive, not Wouk himself. The hotel referred to in the book was the Royal Mail Inn on Hassel Island, located in Charlotte Amalie Harbour. In this novel, Wouk relates stories of happenings, some perhaps fictional and some actual, that he observed while living on St. Thomas, "where the carnival never stops".

Adaptations

The novel was turned into a short-lived musical, and later an

in 1997. Buffett referred to the development of the musical in his

memoir A memoir (; , ) is any nonfiction narrative writing based on the author's personal memories. The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be factual. While memoir has historically been defined as a subcategory of biography or autob ...

of an aeronautical circumnavigation of the Caribbean shortly after his fiftieth birthday, '' A Pirate Looks at Fifty''.

References

1965 American novels Novels by Herman Wouk Novels set in the Caribbean Doubleday (publisher) books Novels set in hotels {{1960s-novel-stub