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, where
he was stationed in New Zealand, and fought as a radioman in combat on Guadalcanal and Tarawa from 1942-44. 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 Saipan, which was featured in Battle Cry. 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.
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, which
is said to have involved two years of research, and thousands of interviews. 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. Exodus illustrated the history
of Palestine from the late 19th c. thru the founding of the state of Israel
in 1948. 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.

According to Jack Shaheen, Americans were largely apathetic about Israel
in the 50s, so the eminent public relations consultant Edward Gottlieb was called on "to create a more sympathetic attitude" toward the newly established state, & sent Leon Uris to Israel to write Exodus, a novel peopled with heroic Israelis and sleazy, brutal Arabs, some of whom are linked with ex-Nazis, to introduce readers to the Arab–Israel conflict. However, this account of Exodus's
creation has been disputed, and the story may have been invented by a
PLO spokesperson.

Uris's 1967 novel Topaz was adapted for the screen and directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1969. 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 c. and WWI.

QB VII, about the role of a Polish doctor in a German concentration camp,
is a dramatic 4-part courtroom novel 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, and was Uris's 2nd consecutive #1 NY 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. His work on the subject of Israel has been criticized for being biased against Arabs.

Uris was married 3 times. His first wife was Betty Beck, whom he married in 1945. They had 3 kids before divorcing in 1968. He then married Marjorie Edwards in 1968, who committed suicide by gunshot the following year.
His 3rd wife was photographer Jill Peabody, daughter of Frances Gleason & Alfred Peabody of Boston. They had 2 kids, Rachel and Conor. They married
in 1970, when she was 22 years old and he was 45. 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. They divorced in 1988, and soon after Uris settled in New York City.

Leon Uris died of kidney failure at his Long Island home on Shelter Island
in 2003, aged 78. His papers can be found at the Harry Ransom Center,
UT Austin, where the U. of Texas Press published a literary biography about him. 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. He was survived by his 5 kids and 2 grands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Uris

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