In a career that spans fifty years, Meyer Levin has assured himself a place in American letters as a realist, a social critic, and an American Jewish writer of note. Levin has been a novelist, playwright, short-story writer, columnist, editor, reporter, producer, war correspondent, and filmmaker. However, despite his various talents, he has been overlooked by almost all serious critics of American literature and has suffered a strange neglect from important reviewers.

Born in Chicago on 8 October 1905, Levin went from the ghetto to the University of Chicago, graduating in 1924. Already a reporter and a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, he worked there until 1925, when he went abroad for a year to study painting at the Academie Moderne in Paris and to travel. He returned to the News and in 1929 produced his first novel, Reporter, which was withdrawn from publication soon after because a newspaper-woman who thought she...