Philip Levine was born in Detroit to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. After graduation from Wayne State University in 1950, he worked at a series of menial jobs and then left Detroit "for good." He married Frances Artley in 1954, and they lived in North Carolina, Florida, and Iowa (where he received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1957), until Levine was awarded the Stanford University Fellowship in Poetry and moved to California, becoming a faculty member at Fresno State College in 1958. He has received, among other awards, the Frank O'Hara Prize in 1972, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1973, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. The Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry in 1987, a National Book Award in 1991 for What Work Is, and a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth.

Like other city children who came to individual consciousness before World War II, Levine met his enemy...