The Old Bunch

First published in 1937, Meyer Levin's novel The Old Bunch recounts the lives of 19 teenagers-11 boys and 8 girls- from the same neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. Too young for World War I, they will later be too old for World War II. But they are not too young or too old for the Great Depression that begins to unravel their lives. Their choices are not easy: whether or not to identify with the suffering of the Jewish people, to seek love rather than status in marriage, to see African Americans as fellow sufferers. Harold Strauss called the book "a landmark in the development of the realistic novel" that "brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived." Levin later became well known for his novel Compulsion, but here he argues for the growth that comes when we learn to speak for ourselves. The Old Bunch is a novel pulsing with life, still vital 75 years after its original publication. It is the story of ordinary neighborhood kids-Jewish boys and girls who, to their immigrant parents' bewilderment, take the spirit of a great American city into their hearts. Newly designed and typeset by Waking Lion Press.