Homage to Martin Levin as Book Reviewer
From The New York Times - 5/30/2008
Martin Levin, a writer, humorist and prolific book critic for whom reading and reviewing five books a week for The New York Times for decades on end was as reasonable, natural and essential as breathing, died on May 21 in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in Manhattan.
His son, Edmund, confirmed his death.
A freelance writer, Mr. Levin had regular bylines in The Times Book Review from 1958 to 1985. To readers of that section he was known in particular as the author of a long-running weekly column in which he reviewed as many as a half-dozen books in a sitting. Originally titled Reader’s Report, the column first appeared in 1961; it concluded in 1977 under the name New & Novel.
It is not possible to say precisely how many books Mr. Levin reviewed in his 27-year association with The Times: the labor needed to tally them defies the length of the workweek. But by any conservative estimate, counting his column and his hundreds of free-standing reviews, Mr. Levin read and reported on more than 3,000 books in his tenure with the paper.
His column had a purpose. Every week Mr. Levin was handed a stack of fiction that the Book Review’s editors deemed worthy of mention but not so worthy as to rate stand-alone reviews. His portfolio typically included a thicket of forgettable first novels, a welter of westerns and a great many multigenerational family sagas. Authors and publishers whose books turned up in the column spoke, dolefully, of having been Levinized.
But amid the flotsam Mr. Levin spied glimmers that had escaped his editors’ notice. In 1962 he rhapsodized over “Stern” (Simon & Schuster), Bruce Jay Friedman’s first novel. The same year, he praised Ken Kesey’s debut novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (Viking).Of the thousands of books Mr. Levin reviewed, his son said, the one he loved best was “The Wind” (Braziller, 1959), an enigmatic novel by the French writer Claude Simon. Mr. Simon won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985.
Martin Emanuel Levin was born in Manhattan on March 18, 1919. Growing up in Greenwich Village, he read through the entire children’s room, from A to Z, of the old Jackson Square branch of the New York Public Library, on Eighth Avenue and 13th Street.
Mr. Levin earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Columbia University. In World War II he served with the Army Air Forces in Europe, where, his son said, his duties included commanding a mission to Gibraltar to procure duty-free Scotch and bananas.
From the late 1950s to the early ’70s, Mr. Levin compiled a regular humor column for The Saturday Review. Called the Phoenix Nest, it featured original contributions from writers like George S. Kaufman, James Thurber and Ogden Nash.
Besides his son, Mr. Levin is survived by a daughter, Andrea Levin, and two grandchildren, all of Manhattan. His wife, the former Selene Holzman, whom he married in 1947, died in 2000.
Mr. Levin’s books include “Whatever Happened to Lady Chatterley’s Lover?” (Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1985), in which he speculated satirically on the fates of various fictional characters. He edited several anthologies, among them “The Phoenix Nest” (Doubleday, 1960) and “The Bedside Phoenix Nest” (Washburn, 1965).
But it was as a critic that Mr. Levin was undoubtedly best known. This was never more apparent than on April 7, 1963, when The Times Book Review returned to print after a 114-day newspaper strike. Mr. Levin marked the occasion by reviewing 38 books at once.
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