He is in Baltimore at the invitation of Johns Hopkins University - giving a public lecture, handshaking if not hobnobbing with academic literati (John Barth, for one), meeting the storytellers of tomorrow in seminar. On this day the writer who never finished high school is back on his home turf. It takes a measure of guts - not to say ego - to construct a vita like that, laying it all out. Here he is, too, marrying Jill Peabody, 22 years his junior, at the Algonquin Hotel. Hitchcock bounces him from the screenwriting of 'Topaz.' See him the victor in a seamy London libel trial mailing back a key to the City of Baltimore researching 'Trinity' in earshot of Belfast sirens. Here he is (page 7) getting canned by Otto Preminger during the making of 'Exodus.' Now Harper & Row is (allegedly) reneging on a contract. 'Most of what caused her action will remain a secret, forever,' states the resume. 'The marriage of two decades was now running a rocky course.' The suicide of his second wife, an Aspen silversmith, who was found one morning in fresh snow, following a quarrel, dead from a 38-caliber pistol. The major happenings are all here: the operetta he wrote at 7 when his dog died. He has also written a 15-page, single-spaced, third-person biographical resume. He has written film scripts, a (failed) Broadway play, a couple of coffee-table picture books. At last count, 'Exodus,' his all-time blockbuster, has been published in 50 languages. He is the author of eight novels, five of them No. 'Well, I'm in my 54th year,' he laughs, when his wife calls him on it. Leon Uris is 53, though he has a habit of uppiing it to 54. 'Oh, no, Lee's not hard to get along with,' says Jill Uris. When you ask a dumb question ('What are the Irish really like?'), he tells you so to your teeth. Though he swears he's mellow now, even 'laid back,' his hawklike eyes give it all the lie. He looks like an old street fighter and ex-Marine, and he is.

Leon Uris is a tough, squat, mod-haired, blunt-nosed son of an immigrant paperhanger.

The book exodus by leon uris