After eight novels—Battle Cry, The Angry Hills, Exodus, Mila 18, Armageddon, Topaz, QB VII, and Trinity—Leon Uris continues to prompt conflicting assessments. Literary critics disparagingly dismiss his work as something less than "serious."… On the other hand, Uris has nurtured in the last thirty years a loyal American readership which renders almost every Uris novel a runaway bestseller. In short, Uris remains a reader's writer and a critic's nightmare. The ...

The conventions of World War II fiction are hardening. Following them, the novelists assemble a group of self-conscious types meant to represent a cross-section of America's regional, racial and social problems. The war novelists continue to show us the types in civilian settings, emphasizing the social data. And then they shift the scenes, and the moral and social values, and take their types to war, to share a common experience. The treatment, by convention, is almost always realistic. If the resul...

Leon Uris has done the nearly impossible. He has written a wonderfully different kind of war novel…. His "Battle Cry" is nearly as long as the other successful treatments of the Second World War; it has many of the same characters and now traditional Anglo-Saxon words, but Mr. Uris is not angry or bitter or brooding. He obviously loves the Marine Corps, even its officers. Thus, he may have started a whole new and healthy trend in American war literature. Leon (Ma...

Hmm. Bank balance down. Time to do another Big Novel. But what about?… Got it! Berlin and the airlift. It has flyers and wild blue yonders, and conflict with the Russkies, and a small band of far-seeing Army officers, and fräuleins, and bad Germans and maybe a few good ones this time, and … Leon Uris' new novel [Armageddon] is the predictable end product of an interior monologue just like that. And it must be conceded that Uris, who once publicly pronounced himself "the mo...

Send an American novelist to Europe, set the time during the German occupation, pick almost any country and make the girl a creature of the Underground and you are pretty certain to get a novel, else what's a writer for? Mr. Uris' Michael Morrison is such a person and "The Angry Hills" is his story—a "suspense" novel with plenty of briskly paced action meted out against a Grecian backdrop under the menacing overhang of war…. As a slam-bang adventure no...

Like Mr. Uris' other novels, Armageddon is a vast panorama of people, places, situations both fictional and quasi-historic, and romantic sentiment rather easy to come by. It ranges among locales as widely distant as Siberia and Hawaii and portrays such diverse characters as a Berlin lesbian, a martyred Kulak farmer, an American general much like Lucius Clay, a Madison Avenue adman, and Josef Stalin. Each of these is as much a character in his own right as he is the illustration of a historical factor...