Written, Unwritten, and Vastly Rewritten: Meyer Levin'sIn Searchand Philip Roth's “Defender of the Faith,”The Plot Against America, andIndignation

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) andThe Plot Against America(2004). When read in the context ofIn Search, “Defender of the Faith” foreshadows Roth's artistic approach to ostensibly autobiographical, retrospective narration inThe Plot Against America, also casting light on references, inIndignation(2008) andThe Humbling(2009), to amputation, insensate outlooks, and ethnic and creative insecurity. Whatever his agreement or dissent from Levin's outlook on Judaism,In Searchappears to have remained for Roth a perpetual fount of creative inspiration for retrospective narrative technique and for psychoanalytical literary realism.