The Spell of Time

Meyer Levin (1905-1981) was an American novelist, journalist, and filmmaker, and one of the most prolific Jewish American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago to immigrant parents, he studied at the University of Chicago and began his career as a newspaper reporter. His early novels, including Reporter (1929) and Yehuda (1931), drew on both city journalism and his growing engagement with Jewish and Zionist themes.

His breakthrough came with The Old Bunch (1937), a sweeping, realistic portrait of a group of second-generation Jewish Americans coming of age in Chicago. He later reported from Europe and Palestine and documented the aftermath of the Holocaust, including a stint as a war correspondent and work on documentary films.

His best-known work, Compulsion (1956), a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murder case, became a bestseller and was adapted for stage and film. Levin was also a passionate early advocate for The Diary of Anne Frank in the United States. His dispute over the dramatization of the diary, and the legal battle with Otto Frank that followed, consumed much of his later life and became the subject of his memoir The Obsession (1973).

Levin settled largely in Israel from the 1950s onward, and later novels such as The Settlers (1972) and The Harvest (1978) drew on that experience. His novel The Stronghold (1965) earned the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction in 1966. Levin died in Jerusalem in 1981.