Leon Uris (August 3, 1924 - June 21, 2003) was an American novelist, known for the amount of research he did for his novels. Uris never finished high school as he left school to join the Marine Corps. In 1950, Esquire Magazine bought an article from him and this encouraged him to work on a novel. The result was the best seller Battle Cry, graphically showing the toughness and courage of U.S. Marines in the Pacific and The Angry Hills, a novel set in war-time Greece. As a screen writer and a newspaper correspondent, he became intensely interested in Israel which led to his best-known work, Exodus, which is about the founding of the state of Israel.
Later works include Mila 18, a stirring account of Jewish courage in the Warsaw ghetto and QB VII, a chilling novel about the role of a Polish doctor in a German concentration camp.