LEVINE, Norman 1923-2005

(Norman Albert Levine)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born October 22, 1923, in Rakow, Poland; died of a heart attack June 14, 2005, in Darlington, England. Writer. Levine was a novelist and short-story writer whose personal feelings of alienation were often manifested his fiction. Born in Poland of a Jewish family, he spent his childhood in Ottawa, Canada, where his father worked as a fruit seller. With the onset of World War II, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was stationed in Yorkshire, England. It was while here that he became enamored with the English people and came to consider them culturally superior to the Canadians. Finishing his B.A. at McGill University in 1948, and completing a master's degree the next year, Levine found his fascination with England and its literature reinforced by a year spent at King's College, Cambridge, on a fellowship. By this time, Levine had already been publishing poetry, his first two collections being Myssium (1948) and The Tightrope Walker (1950). His next work, The Angled Road (1952), was a novel, but it was his travel book Canada Made Me (1958) that caused Canadian audiences to disapprove of Levine's work. The book was fairly critical of the country, and the result was that for many years thereafter Levine could not get his books published there. He became very popular in England and Europe, however, and was especially appreciated for his short stories, collected in such books as One Way Ticket (1961), I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well (1971), and Why Do You Live So Far Away? (1984). As a Jewish immigrant who later became an expatriate author, Levine often felt himself to be an outsider, and the theme of alienation found its way into much of his fiction. Levine earned popularity through his writing, however, and with the exception of a year as head of the English department at Barnstaple Boys Grammar School in Devon from 1953 to 1954, and a year as resident writer at the University of New Brunswick from 1965 to 1966, he made his living through his writings. Later in his career, he regained the acceptance of Canadian audiences and publishers, and even received two Canada Council arts awards. In 2002, he was presented with the Writers' Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award for his lifetime contributions to literature. Among his more recent books are Something Happened Here (1991) and By Frozen River (2000).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Guardian (London, England), July 1, 2005, p. 29.

Independent (London, England), June 20, 2005, p. 34.

Times (London, England), July 16, 2005, p. 70.