American novelist, radio and short story writer (for publications like Collier's, Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy and The Saturday Evening Post) and playwright, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His best-selling work, "The Young Lions" (1948), was set during World War II. Arguably, his crowning achievement was "Rich Man, Poor Man" (1970), a sprawling saga which traces a family through three generations and which was filmed as a hugely successful miniseries.