I know they never mention me with the American sweethearts. 'I'm no Solzhenitsyn,' he told The Washington Post in 1978, referring to the Nobel Prize- winning Russian dissident writer.

Downey wrote in the publication Communications Monographs that 'Uris remains a reader's writer and a critic's nightmare.'Ī raffish and confrontational man, he had a pungent and defensive retort to reviewers who thought him lacking as a stylist and thinker. But like many authors of page-turning prose, he sustained a lifetime of mixed reception from literary critics who found his works cliched and his characters stereotypes. Uris drew in tens of millions of readers with sweeping storylines and prose that skipped along at a furious pace. Starting with his first book, 'Battle Cry' (1953), about a Marine Corps unit during World War II, Mr. His popular success as a novelist is more certain. Corral' (1957), starring Burt Lancaster as lawman Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as gambler Doc Holliday.

He had one notable success in Hollywood: writing the original screenplay for the praised 'Gunfight at the O.K. Uris disparaged the film adaptations of his books as unfaithful to his words and said he was proud to have been fired from those projects as a screenwriter by directors including Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock. Otto Preminger directed the 1960 film version starring Eva Marie Saint and Paul Newman.

The book was translated into more than 50 languages and smuggled into communist countries, where it was viewed as a landmark publication chronicling the spirit of Jewish struggle. 'Exodus' (1958), perhaps his most popular work, was about an American nurse and an Israeli guerrilla fighter who become involved romantically and politically during the fight to establish Israel. Captivated by stories about grit and determination, he saw in the Irish independence movement a similar history of political strife and made it the subject of 'Trinity.' Uris, a Baltimore native of hardscrabble beginnings, said his Jewish heritage and ardent Zionism inspired many of his books, notably 'Exodus' and 'Mila 18,' but he did not consider himself a writer concerned only with Jewish themes. Leon Uris, 78, who wove history and adventure into mega-selling books such as 'Exodus' and 'Trinity,' which ensured his place as one of the best-known novelists of the past century, died June 21 at his home in Shelter Island, N.Y.

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