Levine, Philip

Levine, Philip,

1928–2015, American poet, b. Detroit, grad. Wayne State Univ. (B.A., 1950; A.M., 1954), Univ. of Iowa (M.F.A., 1957). The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he held a variety of industrial jobs as a young man, and his work experiences shaped the subjects and tone of many of his free-verse poems. In language resembling everyday speech, Levine described the lives and labors of America's urban working class. Other subjects include his own life and immigrant roots and, arising out of his strong antifascism, Spanish anarchism and the Spanish civil war, as in The Names of the Lost (1976). From his first collection, On the Edge (1961), to his last, the posthumous The Last Shift (2016), he produced more than 20 volumes of poetry. He was awarded the National Book Award twice, for Ashes (1979) and What Work Is (1991), and won the Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth (1994). Levine also edited and translated the work of other poets. U.S. poet laureatepoet laureate
, title conferred in Britain by the monarch on a poet whose duty it is to write commemorative odes and verse. It is an outgrowth of the medieval English custom of having versifiers and minstrels in the king's retinue, and of the later royal patronage of poets, such
..... Click the link for more information.  from 2011 to 2012, he was on the faculty of California State Univ., Fresno from 1958 to 1992, and taught at a number of other universities.

Bibliography

See his essay collection, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994), Don't Ask (interviews, 1982), So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (2002), and My Lost Poets: A Life in Poetry (2016), essays, speeches, and journal entries; studies by C. Buckley (1991) and M. L'Esperance and T. Q. Morin, ed. (2013).

Levine, Philip

(1928– ) poet; born in Detroit, Mich. He studied at Wayne State University (B.A. 1950; M.A. 1955), the University of Iowa (M.F.A. 1957), and Stanford (1957). He taught at California State University: Fresno (1981), edited and translated volumes of poetry, and won many awards for his own work. He is known for his spare, reflective poetry, as in What Work Is (1991).

Levine, Philip

(1900–87) immunohematologist; born in Kletsk, Russia. He came to Brooklyn with his parents in 1908. He was a research assistant at the Rockefeller Institute (1925–32), where, in 1928, he and Nobel laureate Karl Landsteiner codiscovered the M, N, and P human blood groups. Levine taught and performed bacteriological research at the University of Wisconsin (1932–35), was a bacteriologist and serologist at Beth Israel Hospital, Newark, N.J. (1935–44), and actively endorsed laws ordering blood tests for paternity at both institutions. In 1940, with Landsteiner and Alexander Weiner, he discovered the Rh factor in human blood and was the first to publish results of subsequent research on fetal-maternal isoimmunization due to this factor. He became director (1944–66), emeritus director (1966–75), then consultant (1975–85) at the Ortho Research Foundation, Raritan, N.J., whose immunohematology division was renamed the Philip Levine laboratories shortly after his arrival.