Harry Levin | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 18, 1912 |
| Died | May 29, 1994 (aged 81) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Literary criticism |
| Main interests | Modernism andcomparative literature |
Harry Tuchman Levin (July 18, 1912 – May 29, 1994) was anAmericanliterary critic andscholar of bothmodernism andcomparative literature.[1]
Levin was born inMinneapolis, the son of Beatrice Hirshler (née Tuchman) and Isadore Henry Levin.[2][3] His family wasJewish.[4] Levin was educated atHarvard University (where he was a contemporary ofM. H. Abrams). According to a biographical memoir byWalter Jackson Bate:
After graduatingsumma cum laude in 1933, he was appointed Junior Fellow in then-new Harvard University Society of Fellows, the university's highest honour bestowed upon graduate students, where he pursued in depth what were to become his three major interests: Shakespeare and the English Renaissance; modern literature generally; and the relation of English and American to other literatures, from Greek and Latin antiquity to the present, all of which are reflected in his early publications, giving him a perspective lacking in the ordinary specialist and scarcely matched in his later years by more than three or four scholars here or abroad. In the 1930s, junior fellows did not normally take a Ph. D., so that Harry, like his noted predecessor, George Lyman Kittredge, remained an A.B., though he was in time to receive six honorary degrees, including ones from Oxford and the Sorbonne, and though he was, over the years, to supervise over ninety doctoral theses.[5]
Levin began teaching atHarvard in 1939 and that same year he married Elena Zarudnaya. He was namedIrving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard in 1960 and retired in 1983. He continued to live near campus inCambridge, Massachusetts, until his death in 1994. He was survived by his widow Elena and their daughter Marina.
Levin was an elected member of both theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theAmerican Philosophical Society.[6][7]
Levin's course in "Comedy on the Stage" inspiredLeonard Lehrman to write the paper, "The Threepenny Cradle," comparing theBrecht-WeillThreepenny Opera toMarc Blitzstein'sThe Cradle Will Rock. In the fall of 1969, in a production ofCradle 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'sThe Days of the Commune, and a triple-bill in memory of Blitzstein, which was attended byLeonard 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 theHarry Levin Prize for books on literary history or criticism and in 1997, Harvard University endowed the new chair (position) ofHarry Levin Professor of Literature.
