A short life of the author
Meyer Levin (8 October 1905 – 9 July 1981) was an American novelist, journalist, and filmmaker whose literary career produced at least one significant novel — Compulsion (1956), a fictionalised account of the Leopold and Loeb murder case — and whose life was consumed by one of the strangest and most bitter literary feuds in American history: his decades-long battle over the theatrical adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. Levin was a prolific and serious writer — he published more than a dozen novels, several works of non-fiction, and a major autobiography — but he is remembered primarily for Compulsion and for the Anne Frank affair, which haunted the last twenty-five years of his life.
Life and Career
Levin was born on the West Side of Chicago to Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant parents. He grew up in the same neighbourhood as Leopold and Loeb — he attended the University of Chicago at the same time as them and was eighteen when they committed their murder of Bobby Franks in 1924. The case fascinated him for the rest of his life.
He began his career as a journalist at the Chicago Daily News and later worked as a foreign correspondent and filmmaker. He went to Palestine in the 1920s and was one of the first American journalists to report from the Yishuv. He was also among the first American correspondents to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp after its liberation in 1945, an experience that profoundly shaped his later writing and his commitment to Jewish causes.
Compulsion (1956)
Compulsion is a fictionalised account of the Leopold and Loeb case — the 1924 murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy, intellectually precocious University of Chicago students who attempted to commit the “perfect crime” as a Nietzschean intellectual exercise. The novel follows the crime, the investigation, the arrest, and the trial, at which Clarence Darrow’s defence plea — arguing against the death penalty — is one of the most famous courtroom speeches in American history.
Levin, who had been a near-contemporary of Leopold and Loeb, brought personal knowledge to the novel and created a work that is both a gripping crime narrative and a serious exploration of the relationship between intellectual arrogance and moral catastrophe. The book was a bestseller, was adapted into a Broadway play (1957) and a film (1959, starring Orson Welles as the Darrow character), and is now regarded as a precursor to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) in its blending of novelistic technique with real criminal events.
The Anne Frank Affair
Levin’s involvement with The Diary of Anne Frank is the most painful chapter of his career. He was among the first Americans to read the diary, wrote an enthusiastic review for the New York Times Book Review in 1952, and was initially asked by Otto Frank to write the theatrical adaptation. Levin produced a script that emphasised the diary’s Jewish content — its account of Jewish persecution, Jewish faith, and the specifically Jewish catastrophe of the Holocaust.
Otto Frank rejected Levin’s script in favour of a version by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which universalised the diary’s themes — Anne’s famous line “I still believe that people are really good at heart” was emphasised, while the specifically Jewish suffering was muted. Levin was devastated. He believed — and argued publicly for the rest of his life — that the Goodrich-Hackett version was a deliberate de-Judaisation of the diary, motivated by a desire to make it palatable to a general American audience.
He sued Otto Frank and the producers. He won an initial judgment for damages but the verdict was later overturned. The case dragged on for years and consumed Levin emotionally, financially, and creatively. His later novel The Obsession (1973) is a fictionalised account of the affair. Critics and scholars remain divided: some see Levin as a man with a legitimate grievance about the suppression of Jewish specificity; others see him as a writer whose ego and resentment distorted his judgment.
Other Work
Citizens (1940) is a social-realist novel about the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre at the Republic Steel plant in Chicago. The Settlers (1972) and The Harvest (1978) are epic novels about Jewish settlement in Palestine. In Search (1950) is his autobiography, a significant document of American-Jewish intellectual life in the mid-century.
Collecting Levin
Compulsion (1956, Simon & Schuster) in first edition with dust jacket brings $40–$100. Citizens (1940) brings $30–$60. Levin’s other novels are modestly priced. Signed copies are uncommon. Materials related to the Anne Frank controversy — correspondence, legal documents, manuscript drafts of Levin’s adaptation — are of significant historical interest to scholars and collectors of Holocaust-related materials.