ABSTRACT
I Leon Uris has a string of bestsellers to his credit. His two supersellers, Exodus (#1 title in 1975, later an internationally successful film) and Trinity (seventy appearances in the NYT list as a hardback), take the familiar ‘making of a nation’ theme. It is mainly an American subject matter, America being the country which has been most spectacularly made in recent history. But the mode is transferable. As Uris puts it: ‘You can write westerns in any part of the world’ (Publishers Weekly, 29 March 1976). Exodus (Israel) and Trinity (Ireland) centreonepic historical moments-1947 and 1916. They celebrate the contribution of personal heroism to the forging of new supra-personal national identity, maximizing the role of the individual while glorifying the collectivity of the new-born state. It is only at such dramatic moments as national genesis, and usually only in the imaginary past, that the tension between state and individual can be thus dissolved. Novels such as Uris’s (and Michener’s) allow the luxury of a good wallow in a paradoxical condition of absolute heroic individualism and selfless devotion to a common cause. Classically, and tediously, this therapeutic drama has been set in the American west. Uris has profitably varied the formula by exporting it to worldwide relocations.
