Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller

Never especially popular with the critics, Leon Uris was one of the biggest-selling writers of the 20th century (Battle Cry; Exodus; Trinity). Nadel doesn’t overpraise his subject’s writing, which he calls “inept,” but says Uris’s blend of historical research, larger-than-life heroes fighting injustice, and romance thrilled readers. Uris (1924–2003) was as feisty as any of his fictional creations. A high school dropout who couldn’t wait to join the Marines after Pearl Harbor, and largely self-taught, Uris certainly demonstrated that living well is the best revenge. Working in the movies, he had a love-hate relationship with Hollywood: lapping up the pay and glamour at first as the routine helped discipline his writing, but ultimately souring on the experience. (He was fired from the film Exodus by Otto Preminger and from Topaz by Hitchcock.) Uris’s personal life tracked a similar pattern of honeymoon period followed by aggressive knockdowns from the pedestal. He had a lousy relationship with his Russian-Jewish immigrant father—a disillusioned former Communist—and ”worrying, guilt-creating” mother, and three failed marriages, one of which ended with his wife’s suicide. Nadel (Ezra Pound: A Literary Life) serves up an almost breathless, informative account of the surface events of his subject’s life. 31 b&w photos. (Oct.)