Meyer Levin Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Meyer Levin

Although a writer on the American-Jewish scene for over fifty years, Meyer Levin never received the kind of critical or popular acclaim bestowed on many of his contemporaries. Despite this fact, Levin was a consistent writer who produced a wide variety of works touching on almost every aspect of Jewish and American-Jewish life in the twentieth century. He was also one of the first writers to deal with the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. In neither instance did he write as an outsider or as a tourist, but as one who had fully absorbed the history and experiences of both seminal events.

Nonetheless, his novels failed to capture the imagination of the public, and with the exception of his novel Compulsion, he never enjoyed a major success. A reason for the public's lack of interest may have been that stylistically Levin never escaped his days as a newspaper reporter and his prose style had a certain blandness and Dreiseresque flooding of detail.

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