Word: levins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reactions of the Attorney General and Judge Goldberg to Tropic show that they do not understand a book which they have banned. Shocked by Miller's words, they have not penetrated to Miller's meaning. At the trial, witnesses like Harry Levin tried to explain this; but in vain. And it seems certain that Levin's final statement was also in vain: "As a citizen of the Commonwealth, I would be ashamed to be denied the right to read a book talked about by the rest of the world...
London brought in literary critics, such as Mark Schorer, Harry Moore, and Harry T. Levin, who had praised Tropic of Cancer's literary merit. Also, the defense raised some constitutional objections to the Massachusetts obscenity statute, arguing that the hearings were a violation of the First and Fourteenth amendment constitutional rights...
Nearly drowning in a sea of requited passion, Levin surfaces only to get into more trouble. He rifles the desks of his colleagues in his search for proof that academic freedom is being violated, he rashly campaigns to prevent the cuckolded Dr. Gilley from becoming department head and, in general, behaves like an abrasive cinder in the well-oiled mediocrity of Cascadia State...
...bland and unassuming Northwesterners suddenly close ranks against the wild man from the East. His teaching career in ruins, saddled with Pauline Gilley and her two children, Levin departs-uncertain to the very end whether he is Pauline's savior or her victim...
...Malamud remains as expert as before in his persuasive alternations of farce and sadness, the tender Chekhovian qualities that have marked all his work. His hero, Levin, is a born victim of circumstance: if he holds a baby on his lap, it wets him; if he holds a class spellbound, it is only because his fly is open. He is a man with a rage for justice, and an inner compulsion to keep "on paying for being alive." But in all his straining leaps toward the highest goals, he is scarcely capable of getting his two left feet...