Leon Uris

The novelist Leon Uris was born in Baltimore to a Polish father and Russian mother. During World War II, he served as a radio operator for the Marine Corps in the Pacific. Uris’s novels were characterized by their epic sweep, engagement with political and military history, and detailed research process. He claimed to have traveled twelve thousand miles within Israel and to have conducted more than 1,200 interviews while researching and writing Exodus (1958). Exodus, which at the time of its publication was the best-selling American novel since Gone with the Wind (1936), fictionalized the founding of the state of Israel. It was adapted as an Academy Award–winning film in 1960. Uris’s other novels turned to historical topics including the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Irish independence movement, and the 1949 blockade of Berlin.