On 9 December 1945, before the completion of Aurora Dawn, Wouk married Betty Sarah Brown, a convert to Judaism. The Wouks had three children- Abraham Isaac, Nathaniel, and Joseph-the first of whom died just short of the age of five in 1951.
Wouk's first.novel follows the adventures and loves of Andrew Reale, who is convinced that "the road to happiness lay in becoming rich very quickly." Though the book was not received favorably by the critics, several reviewers recognized Wouk's future potential, and the Book-of-the- Month Club chose it as a featured selection in May 1947. Spencer Klaw of the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review called Aurora Dawn "a delightfully fresh and funny satire on radio advertising that never descends to mere burlesque and is all the more effective because the author-a former radio writer—refrains from grinding any personal axes," while Percy Atkinson of the Saturday Review of Literature appreciated Wouk's "good-natured banter and philosophic discursiveness."
Though both Klaw and Atkinson cited some of the positive qualities of Aurora Dawn, Wouk's exploration of the advertising world was criticized for its highly stylized manner. Russell Maloney of The New York Time Book Review said the novel had "no more authority than a lace valentine." Indeed, though Wouk's parody in the eighteenth-century style is fun, it fails to achieve the primary purpose of works of this kind.
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