Leon Uris: Leon Uris, a high-school drop-out who found huge success as the author of panoramic novels that made history his main character, died on Saturday of congestive heart failure at his home on New York's Shelter Island. He was 78.
His first blockbuster and best-known work was the 1958 novel Exodus, which told the story of the birth of the modern nation of Israel. It was translated into more than two dozen languages and was made into a 1960 movie starring Paul Newman.
Of all his books, Uris said he was most fond of Trinity, his 1976 fictionalised account of Ireland in the early years of the last century and the Rising, in part because of the story of Bobby Sands. Before his death, Sands is said to have memorised whole chapters of Trinity and recited them each night to his fellow IRA inmates. He published a sequel The Redemption in 1995.
As with Exodus, Uris engaged in prodigious research for Trinity, travelling some 10,000 miles around Ireland. The work yielded another book too, a 388-photo essay titled Ireland, a Terrible Beauty, produced in collaboration with his third wife, photographer Jill Uris, with whom he had two children. They later divorced. They also worked together on a photo-essay book on Jerusalem.
But Uris was largely preoccupied by Jewish history for the backdrop of other novels, including Mila 18 (1961), The Haj (1984) and Mitla Pass (1988). His books have sold more than 150 million copies in 29 countries, according to his publisher, HarperCollins. It is releasing his last novel, O'Hara's Choice, in October to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of his first novel, Battle Cry.
Critics frequently faulted Uris for pulpy writing and characters who lacked originality and depth. But they also acknowledged that such deficiencies were rendered irrelevant by the page-turning power of his best works.
"It is a simple thing to point out that Uris often writes crudely, that his dialogue can be wooden, that his structure occasionally groans under the excess baggage of exposition and information," Pete Hamill, reviewing Exodus, wrote in the New York Times. "None of that matters as you are swept along in the narrative. Uris is certainly not as good a writer as Pynchon or Barthelme or Nabokov; but he is a better storyteller."
Uris was born in Baltimore on August 3rd, 1924. He had a poor relationship with his father, a left-leaning Polish Jewish immigrant who rarely had a word of praise for his son.
He found solace in books and at the age of six wrote an operetta inspired by the death of his dog. But in high school he failed English three times and never graduated. He took some classes at Baltimore City College but recalled during a visit decades later that he was its "most unnoteworthy student". He joined the Marines a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor and fought at Guadalcanal and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.
After contracting malaria, he was sent to recuperate in San Francisco, where he fell in love with Betty Beck, a sergeant in the Women's Reserves. They were married in 1945 and had three children together. (He and Beck divorced in 1968. Later that year, Uris married Margery Edwards, but the marriage ended with Edwards' suicide five months later.) Uris's wartime experiences provided the foundation for Battle Cry published in 1953. Praised as an intimate and accurate portrayal of the Marines, it was well-received by critics and readers. Uris was hired to adapt the novel for the screen, the first of several screenplays he would write.
In his second novel, The Angry Hills, Uris focused on the Middle East and the history of Israel. Published in 1955, it was loosely based on a diary by an uncle who was a member of the volunteer Palestinian Brigade.
After a brief detour to write the screenplay for the 1957 Western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Uris moved to Israel to research his next novel. He spent more than two years reading some 300 books and travelling 12,000 miles inside Israel to visit Arab and Jewish towns, frontier farms and communal settlements. He was present at the outbreak of the Sinai War of 1956 and wrote articles about the fighting. He returned to the US with the fodder for Exodus: 1,200 interviews and 1,000 pages of notes. It took him five months to write the 626-page novel; at the time it was the biggest best seller in the US since Gone With the Wind in 1936.
In 1958, Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, said Uris's sweeping novel was "the greatest thing ever written about Israel." Tourism to Israel soared.
Uris portrayed the Zionist state in such glowing terms that some critics said Exodus verged dangerously on propaganda. "Few readers are expert enough to be 100 per cent certain where Mr Uris's imagination has taken over the record," a critic wrote in the Christian Science Monitor.
Many reviewers, however, were as complimentary as Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote that Uris managed to capture "the drama, conflict and excitement of the recent history of Israel in what is probably the best novel of Jewish theme since John Hersey's The Wall." Kirsch noted that Uris was not as skilful a writer as Hersey, "but he possesses a power and commitment to his material which transcends the niceties of craft. In this he seems to belong to the tradition of Dreiser, in which content is much more important than form."
Exodus found new life decades later in the Soviet Union, where Jewish dissidents risked prison terms by circulating hundreds of underground copies. Natan Sharansky, whose high profile as a Jewish refusenik landed him in Soviet prisons for a decade in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote in his book Fear No Evil that Exodus played a critical role in his awareness of his Jewishness.
On a visit to Moscow later, Uris was given one of the bootlegged copies of Exodus that had been circulated by Soviet Jews. It was inscribed "Thank you for reaching us."
Uris said he wrote the book to come to terms with being a Jew. He told the New Jersey Bergen Record in 1988 that "I was raised in a left-wing background, and I wasn't fortified in my religion. I did not have a religious upbringing and I did not have the moral wherewithal to withstand anti-Semitism, which I ran into at a very early age in the Marine Corps. So I felt this was something I had to resolve for myself."
Exodus was made into a movie by Otto Preminger, who kicked Uris off the set after a disagreement. Other forays into Hollywood also ended unhappily. Alfred Hitchcock fired him as screenwriter on Topaz, based on Uris's 1967 novel set against the Cuban missile crisis, and Robert Aldrich claimed Uris did not understand his own characters in The Angry Hills, which became a 1959 movie starring Robert Mitchum.
Leon Uris: born August 3rd, 1924; died June 21st, 2003.