Harry Levin Biography

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Harry Tuchman Levin (July 18 1912 â?? May 29, 1994) was an American literary critic and scholar of modernism and comparative literature.

Born in Minneapolis, Harry Levin was educated at Harvard University (where he was a contemporary of M. H. Abrams), graduated in 1933, and began teaching there in 1939, the same year he married Elena Zarudnaya. He became Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard in 1960, and retired in 1983. He continued to live near campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 1994. He was survived by his widow Elena and their daughter Marina.

His course in "Comedy on the Stage" inspired Leonard Lehrman to write the paper, "The Threepenny Cradle," comparing the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera to Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. In the fall of 1969, in a production of Cradle directed by Lehrman, Levin was the sole patron. In 1970-1971 he encouraged, advised, and became a patron for two other Harvard productions by Lehrman: the U.S. premiere of Brecht's The Days of the Commune, and a triple-bill in memory of Blitzstein, which was attended by Leonard Bernstein. It was at that production that Levin invited Bernstein to become Norton Lecturer at Harvard, which he did, a year later.

In 1985, the American Comparative Literature Association began awarding the Harry Levin Prize for books on literary history or criticism.

In 1997, Harvard endowed the new chair (position) of Harry Levin Professor of Literature.

Works

• Ben Jonson, Selected Works (1938) editor
  
• James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (1941)
  
• Toward Stendhal (1945)
  
• The Portable James Joyce (1947) editor
  
• Toward Balzac (1947)
  
• Perspectives of Criticism (1950) editor
  
• Symbolism and Fiction (1956)
  
• Contexts of Criticism (1957)
  
• The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1958)
  
• The Question of Hamlet (1959)
  
• Irving Babbitt and the Teaching of Literature (1960) Inaugural Lecture
  
• The Scarlet Letter and other Tales of the Puritans by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1961) editor
  
• The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (1963)
  
• The Comedy of Errors (1965) editor
  
• Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (1966)
  
• Why Literary Criticism Is Not an Exact Science (1967)
  
• The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (1969)
  
• Grounds for Comparison (1972)
  
• The Waste Land : From Ur to Echt (1972)
  
• Veins of Humor (1972) editor
  
• A Satire Against Mankind And Other Poems, John Wilmot, Earl Of Rochester (1973) editor
  
• Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (1976)
  
• Memories of the Moderns (1980)
  
• Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (1988)
  

External links

• At Harvard University:
  
  • Guide to the Papers of Harry Levin (with biography)
    
  
  
• At the American Comparative Literature Association:
  
  • The Harry Levin and René Wellek Prizes (given in alternate years)
    
  
  

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