Exodus author Leon Uris dies at 78
Author Leon Uris, an immigrant’s determined son who made it big with the million-selling novel Exodus, has died, his ex-wife said today. He was 78.
He died of natural causes at his home on New York’s Shelter Island, photographer Jill Uris said.
Published in 1958, the 600 page Exodus was a sensation as millions read Uris’ detailed, heroic chronicle of European Jewry from the turn of the century to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
The novel was translated into dozens of languages and was even distributed secretly in communist countries.
“Exodus has been the Bible of the Jewish dissident movement in Russia,” Uris once said. “It’s referred to as The Book.”
Controversy helped Exodus sell when Uris was accused of libel for his depictions of Dr Wladislav Dering, whom the author identified as a war criminal.
In 1964, a London court ruled in favour of Dering, but awarded him minimal damages and made him pay court costs.
In 1960, Exodus was released as a Hollywood film, starring Paul Newman. Uris was originally involved with the screenplay but was reportedly dismissed after a dispute with the director, Otto Preminger.
Nine years later, he was reportedly fired by Alfred Hitchcock from the adaptation of Topaz.
Uris’ other novels included Trinity, an epic best seller about Ireland, QBVII, a courtroom drama based on his legal troubles with Exodusand Mila 18, about the Jewish uprising in Warsaw during the Second World War.
He was given the the Irish Institute’s John F. Kennedy Award in 1976 for Trinity, a typically encyclopaedic story of three Irish families from the mid-19th century to the Easter Rising of 1916.
