Author Bio
• Birth—August 3, 1924
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Death—June 21, 2003
• Where—Shelter Island, Long Island, New York
Leon Marcus Uris was an American novelist, known for his historical fiction and the deep research that went into his novels. His two bestselling books were Exodus, published in 1958, and Trinity, in 1976.
Leon Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland the son of Jewish-American parents Wolf William and Anna (Blumberg) Uris. His father, a Polish-born immigrant, was a paperhanger and then later a storekeeper. William spent a year in Palestine after World War I before entering the United States. 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. "He went from failure to failure."
Uris attended schools in Norfolk, Virginia and Baltimore, but never graduated from high school, having failed English three times. At the age of seventeen Uris joined the United States Marine Corps. He served in the South Pacific as a radioman at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and New Zealand from 1942 to 1945. While recuperating from malaria in San Francisco, he met Betty Beck, a female Marine sergeant. They married in 1945.
In 1950, Esquire magazine bought an article from him and this encouraged him to work on a novel. The result was the best seller Battle Cry, graphically showing the toughness and courage of U.S. Marines in the Pacific and The Angry Hills, a novel set in war-time Greece.
As a screen writer and a newspaper correspondent, he became intensely interested in Israel which led to his best-known work, Exodus, which is about Jewish history from the late 19th century through the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Exodus was a worldwide bestseller, translated into a dozen languages, and was made into a feature film in 1960, starring Paul Newman, as well as a short-lived Broadway musical in 1971.
Later works include Mila 18, a story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising; Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin, which reveals the detailed work by British and American intelligence services in planning for the occupation and pacification of post WWII Germany; Trinity, an epic novel about Ireland's struggle for independence, QB VII, a chilling novel about the role of a Polish doctor in a German concentration camp, and The Haj, with insights into the history of the Middle East and the secret machinations of foreigners which have led to today's turmoil.
He also wrote the screenplays for Battle Cry and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Uris was married three times. First with Betty Beck in 1945, with whom he had three children, and divorced in 1968, then with Margery Edwards in 1969, who died of an apparent suicide a year later, and finally with Jill Peabody in 1970, with whom he had two children, and divorced in 1989. They remained friends. Leon Uris died of renal failure at his Long Island home on Shelter Island, aged 78. (From Wikipedia.)