Summer School Faculty Profile: Stanford Professor David Levin

David Levin, now 36 years old and a visiting professor of English in the Summer School, first came to Harvard 20 years ago to study political theory as an undergraduate in the College. A world war disrupted his education and decisively altered the course of his career.

At the end of the first semester of sophomore year, in 1943, Levin left the University to become a navigator in the Air Force. He returned to Harvard two-and-a-half years later to finish college, and stayed on five more years after Commencement to study for a doctorate in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

This summer he is back at Harvard, not as a student but as a teacher, and to lecture on American literature, not political science. His two courses this summer are English S-70, Major American Writers, and English S-173, Narrative Prose in America.

Levin's interest in American literature and particularly in his speciality, American historical writing, bloomed during his last two years as an undergraduate here. Even before leaving for the service, he had switched his field of concentration from Government to American History and Literature.

Perry Miller's conference course on American romantic literature in his junior year introduced Levin to literary analysis of historical writing, and the unique approach to historiography which he developed after this initial exposure has dominated Levin's academic life since. He left Harvard in 1952 to take a job at Stanford, where he became an associate professor in 1959.

Levin's doctoral thesis analysed the histories of the 19th century masters, George Bancroft, William Prescott, John Motley, and Francis Parkman, all of whom were contemporary to one another, and all of whom where Harvard graduates, members of Boston's Brahmin caste, and writers of superb narrative gifts. Out of this thesis came Levin's first book, History as Romantic Art.

Levin's work became the first full-scale treatment of these eminent American historians as men of letters. His analysis demonstrated the importance in their histories of the same major conventions and preconceptions so evident in the romantic literature of the period. Parkman's portrayal of the morose French explore LaSalle, Levin maintained, derives from the romantic convention of the Byronic hero just as much as say, Herman Melville's delineation of Captain Ahab.

Far from decrying the use of literary conventions in historical characterization, Levin considers that they often permit a truthfulness and life-likeness of portrayal that is often missing in historical narratives. Some abstraction and selection of personal qualities is necessary in portraying character, anyway, according to Levin. Also, he believes, literary conventions often embody important insights into character.