The second of three children—first of identical twins—Philip Levine was born in 1928. His parents, Harry Levine and Esther Gertrude Priscol were Russian-Jewish immigrants who had met in Detroit, the city of Philip's birth. He grew up among that city's working class, and although he received a B.A. in 1950 and an M.A. in 1955 fromWayneState University, he was no stranger to manual labor. Levine worked in a number of Detroit's automobile factories while earning his degrees. His experiences during this time helped to solidify the allegiances he already felt to the working poor and manifested themselves in his poetry which damned greedy capitalists as frequently as it praised the "lowly" wage-earner.

Levine's own desire to be a writer was in large part formed by the hardscrabble working world in which he grew up. Though he admired and paid homage to the working-class heroes of...