Meyer Levin - Leopold and Loeb Case

Leopold and Loeb Case

Meyer wrote the 1956 novel Compulsion inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case. Levin had attended the University of Chicago at the same time as Leopold and Loeb, before the murder of Bobby Franks.

The novel, for which Levin was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1957, was the basis for Levin's own 1957 play adaptation and the 1959 film based on it. Compulsion was "the first 'documentary' or 'non-fiction novel' ("a style later used in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song"). Levin follows the known facts of the case closely, while changing names and using a fictional reporter as a narrator.