Compulsion

Meyer Levin

1956

We waited half through the night, with the news leaking out to us. The confessions were going well. The time was long because the state’s attorney was going over each fact, nailing down the evidence so every point could be proven even if later some smart lawyers had the boys withdraw their statements.

Thus we hovered between the two confession…

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Creator Bio

Meyer Levin

1905–1981

The child of East European immigrants, the novelist and journalist Meyer Levin was born and raised in Chicago, the setting for his masterpiece The Old Bunch (1937), a realistic novel about young Jews in the Jazz Age and during the Great Depression. While his earliest fiction was not concerned with Jewish themes, his writing from the early 1930s on was passionately engaged with the trials and tribulations of contemporary Jewry. He was an outspoken critic of the dejudaized version of Anne Frank’s diary that was presented on Broadway and later filmed by Hollywood and described the troubles he encountered thereby in The Fanatic (1964).

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