Deborah Thomas · Public domain

A rabbi and novelist whose 1967 debut, The Chosen, spent 39 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 3.4 million copies, an extraordinary run for a novel centered on the friendship between a Hasidic boy and a modern Orthodox one in Brooklyn. Potok's fiction brought the interior life of American Orthodox and Hasidic communities to a mainstream readership that had rarely seen it depicted from the inside, and The Chosen was adapted into a well-received 1981 film.