Written, Unwritten, and Vastly Rewritten: Meyer Levin's In Search and Philip Roth's "Defender of the Faith," The Plot Against America, and Indignation

Meyer Levin's first autobiography, In Search (1950), explores the sometimes anguished quest for Jewish identity in ways that anticipate and may have helped to shape the psychological concerns and narrative strategies of Roth's "Defender of the Faith" (1959) and The Plot Against America (2004). When read in the context of In Search, "Defender of the Faith" foreshadows Roth's artistic approach to ostensibly autobiographical, retrospective narration in The Plot Against America, also casting light on references, in Indignation (2008) and The Humbling (2009), to amputation, insensate outlooks, and ethnic and creative insecurity. Whatever his agreement or dissent from Levin's outlook on Judaism, In Search appears to have remained for Roth a perpetual fount of creative inspiration for retrospective narrative technique and for psychoanalytical literary realism.