When he was 17 and in his senior year of high school, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

He served in the South Pacific with the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines Regiment, where he was stationed in New Zealand, and fought as a radioman in combat on Guadalcanal and Tarawa[4] from 1942 through 1944.

[5] While recuperating from malaria in San Francisco, he met Betty Beck, a Marine sergeant; they married in 1945.

Drawing on his experiences in Guadalcanal and Tarawa, he produced the best-selling Battle Cry, a novel depicting the toughness and courage of U.S. Marines in the Pacific.

He then went to Warner Brothers in Hollywood helping to write the eponymous movie which was extremely popular with the public, but not the critics.

[a][10] It was a worldwide best-seller, translated into a dozen languages, and was made into a feature film in 1960, starring Paul Newman, directed by Otto Preminger, as well as into a short-lived Broadway musical, Ari, in 1971, for which Uris wrote the book and lyrics.

Two typewritten Russian translations were circulated as samizdat – illegal, hand-copied works that were passed secretly from hand to hand – and the story was retold orally in the prison camps, with the oral version eventually being written in a notebook which was passed from one generation of prisoners to the next.

[16] His subsequent works included Mila 18, about the Warsaw ghetto uprising; Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin, a chronicle which ends with the lifting of the Berlin Blockade in 1949; Trinity, about Irish nationalism, and the sequel, Redemption, covering the early 20th century and World War I. QB VII, about the role of a Polish doctor in a German concentration camp, is a dramatic four-part courtroom novel written by Uris that was published in 1970, highlighting the events leading to a libel trial in the United Kingdom.

[24] The collection includes all of Uris's novels, with the exception of The Haj and Mitla Pass, as well as manuscripts for the screenplay Gunfight at the O.K.