Faye Levine

Faye Iris Levine was born on 18 January 1944 in Stamford, Connecticut,^[4] the daughter of Bernard Harold Shulman (died 1954) and Lillian Haft.^[1] She grew up in Peekskill, New York.^[5] Her surname came from her adoptive father, Seymour Levine, who her mother married in 1955.^[1] She had one sister, Mina.^[1]

Levine earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, gaining her B.A. in History and Literature in 1965,^[4] her Master of Education in 1970, and her B.I. in 1974.^[1] While at Harvard, she became the first woman executive editor of the Harvard Crimson and the first woman candidate for Harvard Class Marshal.^[1][4] She was a student there at the same time as novelist Margaret Atwood.^[6] Levine also spent a year living in India as a Fulbright scholar, where she taught English while living on a houseboat.^[1][7]

Levine became "famous overnight at Harvard" for her 1963 article "The Three Flavors of Radcliffe".^[8] In 1982, introducing Levine's 1965 essay "The girls who go to Harvard", The Harvard Book, wrote:

Among Harvard people of both sexes who go back to the mid-60s, Faye Levine is famed for three things. She was the first woman executive editor of the Harvard Crimson, she wrote a much quoted article on "the three flavors of Radcliffe," and she ran a bold, spectacular, unsuccessful campaign for marshal of the Harvard Class of 1965.^[9]

Levine became a fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.^[4]

Levine wrote on a range of subjects for many magazines, and was a contributor to publications including Lapham's Quarterly, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and Harper's Magazine.^{[3][10][11][9]} She wrote four books (two novels and two works of non-fiction).^[1] Her first novel,^[12] Solomon and Sheba (1980), was adapted for the stage and had a limited run off-Broadway.^[1]

Her second novel, Splendor and Misery: A Novel of Harvard (1983) was a largely autobiographical account of her time at the university.^[3] It was described as "an elegant and witty fable," and John Leonard of The New York Times called it "marvelous... a splendid first novel".^[12]

Levine was a consulting editor on, and contributor to, Feminist Revolution (1978), a collection published by the women's liberation group Redstockings, with which she had been involved since 1973.^[2]

At the time of her death, Levine was working on a fifth book, Pythagoras: A Romantic Triangle.^[1]

Faye Levine died at home on 18 November 2014, and was privately interred in Putnam Valley, New York.^[1]