Novelist Leon Uris, author of 'Exodus,' dies

NEW YORK -- Leon Uris, whose best-selling novel "Exodus" offered the world a heroic tale of the founding of Israel and an image of Jews as muscular, sunburned avengers, has died at 78.

Uris, who died of congestive heart failure Saturday at his home on New York's Shelter Island, was as much an adventurer as an author, and his other novels included the spy thriller "Topaz"; the courtroom drama "QBVII"; "Mila 18," about the Jewish uprising in Warsaw during World War II; and "Trinity," an epic about the Irish.

But it was "Exodus," published in 1958, that created the biggest sensation among readers and was turned into a 1960 movie.

Millions read Uris' detailed chronicle of European Jewry from the turn of the century to the establishment of Israel in 1948.

"Exodus" was published just 10 years after Israeli statehood and less than 15 years after the Holocaust. The world had become used to newsreel images of emaciated Jews being marched to their death. But Uris told a different story, of a victorious people standing tall under the desert sun.

"Clearly, 'Exodus' is an ennobling version, pretty much a wartless version of a very real place," said Melvin Jules Bukiet, a professor of writing at Sarah Lawrence College and editor of several anthologies of Jewish writing. "But I think it marked a very powerful moment in terms of the perception of Israel."