Introduction

Abstract

Larry Levine was born in New York City, where his father ran a fruit and vegetable store in Washington Heights and gave a 10 percent discount to schoolteachers. Larry was educated in the public schools, barely graduating from high school, because, as he explained, “I was an absolute screw-up”; he then enrolled in City College of New York and in the graduate program at Columbia University, where he completed his Ph.D. under the direction of Richard Hofstadter. When he left New York for his first job, as an instructor at Princeton University, he described it as crossing the Hudson River into America. The next year, 1962, he would enter the larger America, perhaps the real America—heading westward for California and Berkeley. That is where we met, some forty-two years ago. One of the joys of this profession is the opportunity to share the study and teaching of history with extraordinary people. For forty-two years, I have valued Larry as a close friend, as a fellow Berkeleyan, as a much-valued critic, as a historian whose work influenced my own view of how to re-create the lives, thoughts, and expression of men and women long absent from the historical narrative. On occasion he has been a fellow traveler (by plane and train, for example, from Berkeley to Olomuc, Czech Republic, where we dedicated the library of a close friend, Nathan Huggins, which was donated to Palacky University there after his death). Larry has been a comrade in the original sense of the word (a close friend with shared interests and visions). Our friendship was from the very outset aided and abetted by our interest not only in certain kinds of history, but in sports, politics, film, and music, in people such as Charlie Chaplin, Lenny Bruce, Mel Ott, Reggie Jackson, Thelonious Monk, and Giuseppe Verdi. But most important, perhaps, we shared working-class roots, Larry the son of a Jewish fruit and vegetable store keeper from New York, I the son of a Jewish gardener from Santa Barbara. There I had the advantage. I knew something about Jewish fruit and vegetable peddlers in New York. Larry had never heard of a Jewish gardener from anywhere, nor had anyone else; that I was from Santa Barbara made my very Jewishness suspect.