Meyer Levin

Meyer Levin was an American novelist and Broadway performer born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 7, 1905. He died on July 9, 1981, in Jerusalem. His Broadway appearance came in 1931, when he performed in If I Were You.

Levin began publishing fiction in the late 1920s, producing six novels before World War II. The Reporter (1929) examined modern newspaper life, while Frankie and Johnny (1930) was set in an urban context. Yehuda (1931), published the same year as his Broadway credit, was set on a kibbutz, and The New Bridge (1933) addressed unemployed construction workers during the early years of the Depression. The Old Bunch (1937) chronicled the lives of immigrant Chicago Jews, and Citizens (1940) offered a fictional treatment of the 1937 strike at the Republic Steel Company plant near Chicago.

During his journalism career, Levin worked for the Chicago Daily News and served as an editor at Esquire from 1933 to 1939. He also served as a war correspondent in Europe during World War II, representing the Overseas News Agency and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Additionally, he wrote and directed a documentary film called The Illegals for the Office of War Information, which focused on the smuggling of Jews out of Poland.

Following the war, Levin wrote a stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank with the approval of the Frank family, though his version was not produced on Broadway. A separate dramatization by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett was staged instead, and Levin subsequently filed a plagiarism lawsuit.

His 1956 novel Compulsion, drawn from the Leopold and Loeb case, earned him a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1957. Levin adapted the novel into a play in 1957, and a film version followed in 1959, starring Orson Welles. Compulsion has been identified as the first documentary or non-fiction novel, a form later employed by Truman Capote in In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song. Levin received National Jewish Book Awards in 1966 for The Stronghold and in 1967 for The Story of Israel.