Chaim Potok reflects on his writing process and how he developed characters for some of his greatest novels. Rabbi Dr. Chaim Potok (February 17, 1929 - July 23, 2002) was an American author and rabbi. Herman Harold Potok was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland. His parents, Benjamin Max (d. 1958) and Mollie (Friedman) Potok (d. 1985), gave him a Hebrew name, Chaim Tzvi. His Orthodox education taught him Talmud as well as secular studies. He decided to become a writer as a teenager, after reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Potok is most famous for his 1967 novel "The Chosen", which was also made into a film released in 1981, which won top award at the World Film Festival, Montreal, and later became a musical on Broadway for a short time. It was a semi-autobiographical story about two boys. Reuven Malter, a Modern Orthodox Jew, becomes friends with Danny Saunders, an exceptionally brilliant young son of a Hasidic rabbi. The father, Reb Saunders, expects his son to succeed him as a rabbi and the leader of their Hasidic sect, yet Danny wants to study psychology, a secular field of study. Dr. Potok died of brain cancer in Merion, Pennsylvania, on July 23, 2002.