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Ira B. Nadel

The first biography of the massively popular author of Exodus and Trinity, who “was as feisty as any of his fictional creations” (Publishers Weekly).

As the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII, and Trinity, Leon Uris blazed a path to celebrity with books that readers couldn’t put down. Uris’s thirteen novels sold millions of copies, appeared in fifty languages, and were adapted into equally successful movies and TV miniseries. Few writers equaled his fame in the mid-twentieth century. His success fueled the rise of mass-market paperbacks, movie tie-ins, and author tours. Beloved by the public, Uris was, not surprisingly, dismissed by literary critics. Until now, his own life—as full of drama as his fiction—has never been the subject of a book.

Now Ira Nadel traces Uris from his disruptive youth to his life-changing experiences as a marine in World War II. These experiences, coupled with Uris’s embrace of his Judaism and desire to write, led to his unprecedented success and the lavish excesses of a career as a best-selling author. Nadel reveals that Uris lived the adventures he described, including his war experiences in the Pacific (Battle Cry), life-threatening travels in Israel (Exodus), visit to Communist Poland (Mila 18), libel trial in Britain (QB VII), and dangerous sojourn in fractious Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic (Trinity). 

Nadel also demonstrates that Uris’s talent for writing action-packed yet thoroughly researched novels meshed perfectly with the public’s desire to revisit and understand the tumultuous events of recent history—making him far more popular (and wealthier) than more literary authors—while paving the way for future blockbuster writers such as Irving Wallace and Tom Clancy.

University of Texas Press

Jewish History, Life, and Culture

Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller

Robert A. Rosenstone

The story begins with a grandfather who heroically escaped from Russia by swimming the Pruth River to Romania—or did he? Then there are stories of another grandfather who kept a lifelong mistress; grandmothers who were ignored except in the kitchen; migrations legal and illegal from Eastern Europe to Canada to California; racketeers on one side of the family and Communists on the other; and a West Coast adolescence in the McCarthy years. All of these (mostly true) stories form a Jewish family's history, a tale of dislocation and assimilation. But in the hands of award-winning historian Robert Rosenstone, they become much more. The fragments of memory so beautifully preserved in The Man Who Swam into History add unforgettable, human characters to the now familiar story of the Jewish diaspora in the twentieth century. 

 This combination memoir/short story collection recounts the Rosenstone family's passage from Romania to America. Robert Rosenstone tells the story not as a single, linear narrative, but through "tales, sequences, windows, moments, and fragments resurrected from the lives of three generations in my two parental families, set in five countries on two continents over the period of almost a century." This more literary and personal approach allows Rosenstone's relatives to emerge as distinct personalities, voices who quarrel and gossip, share their dreams and fears, and maintain the ties of a loving, if eccentric, family. Among the genre of "coming to America" tales, The Man Who Swam into History is a work of unique vision, one that both records and reconstructs the past even as it continuously—and humorously—questions the truth of its own assertions.

The Man Who Swam into History: The (Mostly) True Story of My Jewish Family