Word: levins
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...Levin continued his astronomical rise after college with a Shaw Fellowship, which he used for study at the Sorbonne, and with his appointment, immediately afterwards to Harvard's newly organized Society of Fellows. Famous during this period for his fiery reviews in such liberal intellectual journals as The Nation and The New Republic, he had nevertheless restricted his scholarly endeavors, for the most part, to respectably antique subjects. When James Joyce published his last and longest book, however, Levin could not resist penning a review called "On First Looking Into Finnegans Wake." He was one of the first critics courageous...
...years later, Levin had completed James Joyce, a book which served as the inspiration for New Directions' "Makers of Modern Literature" series, and which most scholars consider the best critical survey of Joyce's work as a whole yet written. He was then an Instructor in English, aged twenty-nine...
...that time he was already noted for the unusual breadth of his scholarship, which eventually ranged from such books as Ben Jonson and The Overreacher, a study of Christopher Marlowe, to Balzac, Flaubert, and Toward Stendhal. Appointed a full professor here in 1948 at the age of 36, Levin has taught courses varying from "Modern American Poetry," which he gave as a visiting professor at Tokyo University last summer, to "Shakespeare" and "Proust, Joyce and Mann...
...Levin has also been able to advise and encourage many of the most promising younger writers in the Cambridge community. Richard Wilbur, for instance, dedicated his recent translation of Le Misanthrope to Levin. Robert Anderson, author of Tea and Sympathy, was a student of Levin and later a section man in his course on the Elizabethan drama, before leaving Cambridge to write the play. And Levin still remembers the day Robert Lowell, then a freshman in the College, came to him for advice as to whether or not he should transfer to Kenyon and John Crowe Ransom (which he eventually...
...breadth of his intellectual interests Levin certainly resembles the teachers who have influenced him most, Alfred North Whitehead and, especially, Irving Babbitt. Babbitt's encyclopdic crudition provoked his students to make bets before lectures as to how many different authors he would refer to in the course of an hour, a custom which would not be out of place in Levin's courses. But Levin is still only at the mid-point of his career. Influenced by some of the greatest teachers in the Harvard tradition, a strong influence himself on some of the brightest students exposed to that tradition...