Gerald Green is best known as the author of the teleplay for the 1978 television mini-series Holocaust, the novelization of which became a best-seller. This work led to a renewed awareness in the United States and Europe of the horrors of Germany's Third Reich. The theme of Holocaust, humankind's capacity for brutality and the individual's potential for courage and nobility, is recurrent in Green's work and was established in his first critically recognized and perhaps most artistically satisfying novel, The Last Angry Man, which later was adapted to the movies. A prolific writer, Green has incorporated issues of social importance in his fiction and nonfiction. Most often he has achieved popular rather than critical success.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Samuel Greenberg, a physician, and Anna Ruth Matzkin Greenberg, Green studied at Columbia University, earning an A.B. in 1942 and an M.S. in journalism in...