URIS, LEON (MARCUS)

born Aug. 3, 1924, Baltimore U.S. novelist known for such panoramic, action-filled works as Battle Cry (1953) and Exodus (1958), which deals with the struggle to establish and defend the state of Israel. Uris served as a Marine in World War II and was a newspaper driver before he turned to writing. Other books include The Angry Hills (1955), an account of the Jewish brigade from Palestine that fought with the British army in Greece; Mila 18 (1961), a novel about the Jewish uprising against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943; QB VII (1970), dealing with Nazi war crimes; Trinity (1976), a chronicle of a Northern Irish farm family from the 1840s to 1916; and The Haj (1984), depicting the lives of Palestinian Arabs from World War I to the Suez war of 1956.