It was a worldwide best-seller, translated into a dozen languages, and was made into a feature film in 1960, starring Paul Newman, directed by Otto Preminger, as well as into a short-lived Broadway musical (12 previews, 19 performances) in 1971. Exodus illustrated the history of Palestine from the late 19th century through the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. It is said that the book involved two years of research, and involved thousands of interviews. Others say that Uris, motivated by an intense interest in Israel, financed his own research for the novel by selling the film rights in advance to MGM and writing articles about the Sinai campaign. That novel would be Exodus, which came out in 1958 and became his best known work.

Later he went on to write The Angry Hills, a novel set in war-time Greece.Īccording to one source, in the early 1950's he was hired by an American public relations firm to go to Israel and 'soak up the atmosphere and create a novel about it'. He then went to Warner Brothers in Hollywood helping to write the movie, which was extremely popular with the public, if not the critics. Drawing on his experiences in Guadalcanal and Tarawa he produced the best-selling, Battle Cry, a novel depicting the toughness and courage of U.S. In 1950, Esquire magazine bought an article, and he began to devote himself to writing more seriously. While recuperating from malaria in San Francisco, he met Betty Beck, a Marine sergeant they married in 1945.Ĭoming out of the service, he worked for a newspaper, writing in his spare time. He served in the South Pacific as a radioman (in combat) at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and New Zealand from 1942 through 1945. At age seventeen, while in his senior year of high school, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Uris enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. Uris attended schools in Norfolk, Virginia and Baltimore, but never graduated from high school, after having failed English three times. He derived his surname from Yerushalmi, meaning 'man of Jerusalem.' (His brother Aron, Leon Uris' uncle, took the name Yerushalmi) 'He was basically a failure,' Uris later said of his father. William spent a year in Palestine after World War I before entering the United States.

His father, a Polish-born immigrant, was a paperhanger, then a storekeeper. Leon Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Jewish-American parents Wolf William and Anna (Blumberg) Uris. His two bestselling books were Exodus, published in 1958, and Trinity, in 1976. Leon Marcus Uris (AugJune 21, 2003) was an American novelist, known for his historical fiction and the deep research that went into his novels.

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