Philip Levine

Author profile

born

January 10, 1928 in Detroit, The United States

genre

Poetry

About this author

Philip Levine (b. January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He is appointed to serve as the Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.

Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit, the second of three sons and the first of identical twins of Jewish immigrant parents. His father, Harry Levine owned a used auto parts business, his mother Esther Priscol (Prisckulnick) Levine was a bookseller. When Levine was five years old, his father died. Growing up, he faced the anti-Semitism embodied by the p...more Philip Levine (b. January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for over thirty years at the English Department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He is appointed to serve as the Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.

Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit, the second of three sons and the first of identical twins of Jewish immigrant parents. His father, Harry Levine owned a used auto parts business, his mother Esther Priscol (Prisckulnick) Levine was a bookseller. When Levine was five years old, his father died. Growing up, he faced the anti-Semitism embodied by the pro-Hitler radio priest Father Coughlin.

Levine started to work in car manufacturing plants at the age of 14. He graduated from Detroit Central High School in 1946 and went to college at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit, where he began to write poetry, encouraged by his mother, to whom he later dedicated the book of poems The Mercy. Levine got his A.B. in 1950 and went to work for Chevrolet and Cadillac in what he calls "stupid jobs". He married his first wife Patty Kanterman in 1951. The marriage lasted until 1953. In 1953 he went to the University of Iowa without registering, studying among others with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the latter of which Levine called his "one great mentor". In 1954 he graduated with a mail-order masters degree with a thesis on John Keats' "Ode to Indolence", and married actress Frances J. Artley. He returned to the University of Iowa teaching technical writing, completing his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1957. The same year, he was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. In 1958 he joined the English Department at California State University in Fresno, where he taught until his retirement in 1992. He has also taught at many other universities, among them New York University as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, at Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Tufts, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Levine and his wife live in Fresno and Brooklyn.(less)

combine editions
Books by Philip Levine

Average rating: 4.25 · 2478 ratings · 215 reviews · 50 distinct works

	What Work Is 430 avg rating — 570 ratings — published 1991 — 4 editions	My rating:
	The Simple Truth by Philip Levine, Harry Ford (Editor) 413 avg rating — 221 ratings — published 1994 — 4 editions	My rating:
	New Selected Poems 437 avg rating — 157 ratings — published 1991 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Breath 396 avg rating — 135 ratings — published 2004 — 2 editions	My rating:
	News of the World 385 avg rating — 122 ratings — published 2009 — 5 editions	My rating:
	They Feed They Lion & The Names of the Lost: Two Books of Poems 426 avg rating — 77 ratings — published 1999	My rating:
	The Mercy 389 avg rating — 74 ratings — published 1999 — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography 424 avg rating — 49 ratings — published 1994 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Not This Pig 381 avg rating — 43 ratings — published 1982	My rating:
	They Feed They Lion 451 avg rating — 35 ratings — published 1972	My rating:

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Quotes by Philip Levine

“You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.”
― Philip Levine

5 people liked it

“I find you
in these tears, few,
useless and here at last.
Don't come back. ”
― Philip Levine

tags: tears

5 people liked it

“I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.”
― Philip Levine

4 people liked it

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