In the following essay, Fife compares the unproduced script Meyer Levin wrote for The Diary of Anne Frank to the popular version of the play written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, contending there is ample evidence that the duo plagiarized Levin's work.

Before his recent death at age 75, Meyer Levin—author of such books as Compulsion, The Settlers, In Search—left the world a copy of his Ethical Will, a document that aspired to pass on to humanity "the moral values learned in a lifetime," which Levin deemed to be "as vital as worldly goods." Levin's true concern, however, turned out to be recounting the story surrounding his long "suppressed" stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank—a story that had obsessed him through the last thirty years of his life. And yet, despite Meyer's last literary testament, basic questions about the...