Ludwig Lewisohn spent his career arguing for what he saw as the need for cultural traditions that would support the development of firm individual identities. He held that people of other backgrounds should develop their traditions with the same imaginative and ethical determination that he urged for his fellow American Jews. The advocating of his sociopolitical views in his short fiction sometimes limited its effect as literary art, but he considered the ideas desperately important.

Some of this insistence on tradition may have been a reaction against the indifference of his parents to their Jewish ancestry. Born on 30 May 1882, he was the only child of Jacques and Minna Eloegger Lewisohn. In Up Stream (1922), the first volume of his autobiography, Lewisohn tells how at the age of seven he was brought from his birthplace in Berlin, Germany, to South Carolina, and how his upbringing in Charleston left him so...