Leon Uris

Writer, journalist, and novelist

• Born: August 3, 1924
• Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
• Died: June 21, 2003
• Place of death: Shelter Island, New York

Uris wrote popular novels of the postwar era that deal with religious and ethnic conflicts, from Ireland to the Middle East.

Early Life

Leon Uris (LEE-on YEW-rihs) was born into a working-class household to parents of Russian Jewish and Polish Jewish background. His father left home after World War I and spent a year in Palestine, in one of the pioneer settlements, before immigrating to the United States; his mother was American-born. Uris decided as a child that his life goal was to be a writer, and he produced a large number of unpublished plays and manuscripts between age seven and his mid-twenties, beginning with an operetta about the death of his dog. His formal training in English in school was less successful, and he failed the subject three times, leading him to observe later in life that English and writing had nothing to do with each other. In contrast to many American Jewish children at the time, he received no formal training in Judaism and could not read Hebrew.

Uris attended Baltimore’s public schools before running away from home to enlist in the United States Marine Corps in 1942 at age seventeen. Uris served a four-year tour of duty chiefly in the Pacific theater as a radio operator. He spent the latter part of his time in San Francisco on limited duty, because he suffered the effects of dengue fever, asthma, and malaria. After the war he married a Marine sergeant and went to work as a circulation manager for a San Francisco newspaper. He repeatedly sent his writing compositions to periodicals, and he eventually had his first story (dealing with the All-American football team) accepted by Esquire in 1950 after several unsuccessful attempts. This encouraged him to begin work on his first novel.

Life’s Work

The group of historical novels for which Uris would become recognized began with Battle Cry in 1953. Drawing on his own experiences in war (especially during the fierce battles of Tarawa and Guadalcanal), Uris presented the complex emotional landscape of men in conflict. The other novels of World War II that Uris read did not tell the story of the Marines in a fashion that reflected the realities he had witnessed and experienced. Another factor that led to the swift popularity of Battle Cry was its emphasis on patriotic values, and its success led Uris to a position in the story department at Warner Bros., where he wrote the scenario for the 1955 film version of Battle Cry (which proved to be a solid success) and contributed to the production of Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

His second work, The Angry Hills (1955), dealt with the Nazi invasion of Greece and was partly based on the diary of his uncle, who had served in the Palestine Brigade. By the time The Angry Hills came to the screen in 1959, Uris had written the screenplay for the iconic western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957).

Returning to the novel form, he transferred his focus on historical-fiction to the major postwar event for the world Jewish community, the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, with the publication of what would become his most famous work,Exodus, in 1958. To ensure that the work was as accurate as possible, Uris logged twelve thousand miles of travel within Israel and a comparable number of interviews with a wide range of Israeli citizens, over two years of writing and documentary research.

An event partly covered through the life of one of the characters in Exodus, the formation and ultimate destruction of the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis, formed the focus of his next novel. Mila 18 (1981), named for the street address of the last bunker of the Jewish resistance to be destroyed after the forty-two day uprising in April and May of 1943. Continuing the detailed research approach begun in Exodus, Uris contacted survivors of the ghetto and its fighting force and interviewed them in the United States and in Europe, meeting some even in Warsaw.

The legacy of the Jews of Poland resurfaced when a survivor whom Uris had named in Exodus as responsible for human experimentation on inmates at Auschwitz brought a libel suit in the British courts. In April, 1964, after some two years of preparation, the case opened in London, with testimony offered in eight languages. The court found in Uris’s favor and awarded the plaintiff a halfpenny in damages.

The devastation in the Polish capital is balanced in his next work, Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin (1963), which follows the transition to postwar politics, a theme continued in his 1967 novel of the Cuban missile crisis, Topaz. The legacy of the concentration camps and its effects on the cultural and legal definitions of innocence is explored in his next work, QB VII (1970), followed by the first of a pair of novels that would portray the complex conflicts within Ireland, Trinity (1976). Uris revisited the era of the creation of Israel again in his 1984 work The Haj, this time presenting the events from the viewpoints of the Palestinian Arab community. His final novel dealing with Israel, Mitla Pass, appeared in 1988 and offered a psychological approach to the life of a Jewish writer who finds himself part of the Israeli troops who will be uselessly decimated by a decision to hold the pass in the 1956 war with Egypt over the Sinai. Redemption (1995) expanded the stories of the Trinity characters, with the growth of the Irish resistance to British rule that would culminate in the Easter Rising in 1916.

Significance

In his varied works, Uris consistently focused his attention on the causes of conflict based on ideology and religion. Using major historical events (ranging from the abstract dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the immediate and complex horrors of the Holocaust) as a canvas on which to mount his clearly defined characters, Uris brings his readers to a new awareness of the depth and the value of their humanity. The depth of information provided in each book about the cultural setting and the principal actions of the story reflects Uris’s deep level of research, making these novels for many readers a first introduction to the human toll and the largely unseen aspects of twentieth century history.

Bibliography

Cain, Kathleen Shine. Leon Uris: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. A chronological examination of Uris’s ten major works, arranging them by plot structure and thematic content.

Hill, Mavis M., and L. Norman Williams. Auschwitz in England: A Record of a Libel Action. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. A detailed history of the unsuccessful suit brought against Uris by Wladislaw Alexander Dering over his depiction in Exodus.

Lovett-Graf, Bennett. “Leon Uris.” In Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. This essay offers some thoughtful insights into Uris’s creative work, framed in the canon of Jewish literary works in the twentieth century.