Compulsion

Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have it all: wealth, intelligence, and the world at their feet as part of the elite, upper-crust Jewish community of 1920s Chicago. Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert, a genius who longs for a companion whom he can idolize and worship. Obsessed with Nietzsche’s idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily picking and murdering a Jewish boy in their neighborhood.

This new edition of Meyer Levin's classic literary thriller Compulsion reintroduces the fictionalized case of Leopold and Loeb – once considered the "crime of the century" – to a new generation. This incisive psychological portrait of two young murderers seized the imagination of an era and is generally recognized as paving the way for the first non-fiction novel. Compulsion forces us to ask what drives some further into darkness, and some to seek redemption.

Heartbreaking as it is gripping, Compulsion is written with a tense and penetrating force that led the Los Angeles Times to call Levin, “the most significant Jewish writer of his times.”

"Before, we had thought the boys could only have committed the murder under some sudden dreadful impulse. But now we learned how the deed had been marked by a long design developed in full detail. What was new to us was this entry into the dark, vast area of death as an abstraction." The mid-'20s Leopold-Loeb case, called "the crime of the century," introduced Americans to a new type of murder: two privileged college students picked a child at random and killed him without a conventional motive, simply as an intellectual experiment. Meyer Levin's 1956 novel is historical fiction in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy--both a compelling story and a meticulous analysis of the different psychologies of the two youths. Compulsion was called "a masterly achievement in literary craftsmanship" by Earle Stanley Gardner in the New York Times Book Review, and it inspired an award-winning film starring Orson Welles as Clarence Darrow.