Word: levins
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...Seymour Levin, a bearded exile from Manhattan, the Pacific Northwest is the Promised Land. Standing beneath a night sky splashed with a million stars, breathing deeply of the forest air. Levin thinks, "Imagine getting all this for nothing!" He tramps for miles through the countryside, exchanging stares with cud-chewing cattle. He had never before seen a Hereford or a Black Angus and "they had never seen a Levin...
Last Year's Train. Everyone is kind. Hearty Dr. Gerald Gilley and his wife Pauline, who looks "like a lily on a long stalk," welcome Levin to Cascadia State College-the only one of 52 U.S. colleges that responded favorably to his application for a teaching job. An ex-drunkard and a repeated failure. Levin is humbly grateful. At 30, he sees himself as a "man still running after last year's train, far behind in the world...
Cascadia's students are handsome, bovine, and interested only in a passing grade. In his determination to give Cascadia his very best, Levin tries to light a divine fire in them, to teach them "what's for sale in a commercial society, and what had better not be." He gets back only a blank, uncomprehending stare. To his fellow teachers, Levin seeks to communicate his passionate belief that the liberal arts should have an equal place in the curriculum alongside animal husbandry and road engineering. They back away as if fearing infection...
...girls of Cascadia respond more warmly to Levin's bearded charm. Teacher Avis Fliss entices him with "her well-stacked bosom and behind like a hard head of cabbage." So does a shapely coed. But love comes thunderously during a chance encounter in an enchanted wood with Pauline Gilley, the susceptible wife of his benefactor...
Publishers of the Tropic, Grove Press Inc., Plan to have a Psychiatrist, an etymologist, and Harry T. Levin, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature, appear in the book's defense...