Leon Uris

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Leon Marcus Uris (August 3, 1924 – June 21, 2003) was an American author of historical fiction who wrote many bestselling books, including Exodus (published in 1958) and Trinity (published in 1976).<ref>"Author Leon Uris Dies at 78", The Elyria (Ohio) Chronicle Telegram, June 25, 2003, p. A8.</ref>

Uris was a co-founder of the Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Israel group.<ref>Considine, p. 299</ref>

Life and careerEdit

Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Jewish American parents Wolf William and Anna (née Blumberg) Uris. His father, born in Volkovysk in the Russian Empire (now Vawkavysk, Belarus), was a paperhanger, then a storekeeper. His mother was first-generation Russian American.<ref>Congressional Record, p. 16911</ref> William spent a year in Palestine after World War I before entering the United States. He derived his last name from Yerushalmi, meaning "man of Jerusalem". (His brother Aron, Leon's uncle, took the name Yerushalmi.) "He was basically a failure", Uris later said of his father. "I think his personality was formed by the harsh realities of being a Jew in Czarist Russia. I think failure formed his character, made him bitter."<ref name="AP">Template:Cite news</ref>

File:Leon Uris with patrol.jpg

Uris in Israel in the 1950s

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Leon Uris during a 1967 visit to Israel

At age six, Uris reportedly wrote an operetta inspired by the death of his dog. He attended schools in Norfolk, Virginia, and Baltimore, but never graduated from high school, and failed English three times. When he was 17 and in his senior year of high school, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He served in the South Pacific with the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines Regiment, where he was stationed in New Zealand, and fought as a radioman in combat on Guadalcanal and Tarawa<ref name="NYTBio">Template:Cite news</ref> from 1942 through 1944. He was sent to the US after suffering from dengue fever, malaria and a recurrence of asthma that made him miss the devastation of his battalion at the Battle of Saipan, which was featured in Battle Cry.<ref>Nadel, Ira B. Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller University of Texas Press, September 24, 2010</ref> While recuperating from malaria in San Francisco, he met Betty Beck, a Marine sergeant; they married in 1945.

Released from service he worked for a newspaper, and wrote in his spare time. Esquire magazine bought an article in 1950, and he began to devote himself to writing more seriously. 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. Marines in the Pacific. He then went to Warner Brothers in Hollywood helping to write the eponymous movie which was extremely popular with the public, but not the critics.<ref name="NYTBio"/> He went on to write The Angry Hills, a novel set in war-time Greece.

His best-known work may be Exodus, which was published in 1958. Most sources indicate that Uris, motivated by an intense interest in Israel, financed his research for the novel by selling the film rights in advance to MGM and by writing newspaper articles about the Sinai campaign,<ref>Leon Uris, 78, Who Wrote Sweeping Novels Like "Exodus," Dies Template:Webarchive New York Times – June 25, 2003</ref><ref name="Fujiwara">Template:Cite book [1]</ref><ref name="Erens">Template:Cite book</ref> which is said to have involved two years of research, and thousands of interviews.Template:Efn<ref name="Shatzky">Template:Cite book</ref> 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, Ari, in 1971, for which Uris wrote the book and lyrics.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Exodus illustrated the history of Palestine from the late 19th century through the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Exodus was also extraordinarily influential among Russian Refuseniks. Two typewritten Russian translations were circulated as samizdat – illegal, hand-copied works that were passed secretly from hand to hand – and the story was retold orally in the prison camps, with the oral version eventually being written in a notebook which was passed from one generation of prisoners to the next.<ref>Beckerman, Gal, When They Come for Us We'll Be Gone, pp. 27-29</ref>

Uris's 1967 novel Topaz was adapted for the screen and directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1969.<ref name="Ransom">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His subsequent works included Mila 18, about the Warsaw ghetto uprising; Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin, a chronicle which ends with the lifting of the Berlin Blockade in 1949; Trinity, about Irish nationalism, and the sequel, Redemption, covering the early 20th century and World War I.

QB VII, about the role of a Polish doctor in a German concentration camp, is a dramatic four-part courtroom novel written by Uris that was published in 1970, highlighting the events leading to a libel trial in the United Kingdom. It is loosely based on a court case for defamation (Dering v Uris) that arose from Uris's earlier best-selling novel Exodus. It was Uris's second consecutive #1 New York Times Best Seller. The Haj was set in the history of the Middle East. He also wrote the screenplays for Battle Cry and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Personal lifeEdit

Uris was married three times. His first wife was Betty Beck, whom he married in 1945. They had three children before divorcing in 1968. He then married Marjorie Edwards in 1968, who committed suicide by gunshot the following year.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=Blagden1976>Template:Cite news</ref>

His third and last wife was photographer Jill Peabody, daughter of Frances Gleason and Alfred Peabody of Boston.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> They had two children. They married in 1970, when Jill was 22 years old and he was 45.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He and wife Jill worked together on his book Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, for which she provided illustrations and on Jerusalem: A Song of Songs.<ref name=Blagden1976 /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> They divorced in 1988, and soon after Uris settled in New York City.<ref name=Harrell2003>Template:Cite news</ref>

DeathEdit

Leon Uris died of kidney failure at his Long Island home on Shelter Island in 2003, aged 78.<ref name="NYTBio"/> His papers can be found at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas in Austin, where the University of Texas Press published a literary biography about him.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The collection includes all of Uris's novels, with the exception of The Haj and Mitla Pass, as well as manuscripts for the screenplay Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.<ref name="Ransom"/> He was survived by his five children and two grandchildren.<ref name=Harrell2003 />