Unquestionably, Wouk emulates in The Winds of War and its sequel the works of great writers of both history and fiction who have attempted to capture the essence of important national and international conflicts. The creation of a single family as the focus for exploring the conflict is a technique borrowed from Leo Tolstoy, who used it with great skill in War and Peace (1869), the work that Wouk has most clearly in mind as the model for his study. Wouk is also influenced in his techniques of plotting by such nineteenth-century masters as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and William Makepeace Thackeray.