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,[4] his mother, Esther Priscol (Pryszkulnik) Levine, was a bookseller.[5] When Levine was five years old, his father died.[6] While growing up, he faced the anti-Semitism embodied by Father Coughlin, the pro-Nazi radio priest.[7] In high school, a teacher told him, “You write like an angel. Why don't you think about becoming a writer?“[8] At this point, he was already working at night in auto factories, though he was just 14 years old. Detroit Central High School graduated him in 1946, and he 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 dedicated the book of poems The Mercy.[9] Levine earned his A.B. in 1950 and went to work for Chevrolet and Cadillac in what he called "stupid jobs."[2] The work, he later wrote, was “so heavy and monotonous that after an hour or two I was sure each night that I would never last the shift.”[8]
He married his first wife, Patty Kanterman, in 1951. The marriage lasted until 1953.[5]
In 1953, he attended the University of Iowa without registering,[10] studying with, among others, poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the latter of whom Levine called his "one great mentor."[11]
In 1954, he earned a mail-order master's degree with a thesis on John Keats' "Ode to Indolence,"[6] and married actress Frances J. Artley.[4]
He returned to the University of Iowa teaching technical writing and completed his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1957.[6] 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, Fresno, where he taught until his retirement in 1992. He also taught at many other universities, among them New York University as a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Tufts, Vanderbilt, and the University of California, Berkeley.[12]
Levine and his wife had made their homes in Fresno and Brooklyn Heights.[13][14] He died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2015, at age 87.[15]
