From Notable Alumni · Foundation editorial

Book critic for The New York Times for twenty-seven years, during which he read and reviewed more than three thousand books; publishers and authors turned his name into a verb. Martin Emanuel Levin (CC 1940, MA 1941) was, perhaps, the most prolific book reviewer in the modern history of American criticism. He wrote for The New York Times Book Review from 1958 to 1985. His weekly column, called Reader's Report from 1961 and New & Novel from 1977, was where the editors sent the manuscripts they had judged worthy of notice but not worthy of a standalone review: a thicket of forgettable first novels, a welter of westerns, a great many multigenerational family sagas. Levin reviewed them, six or eight at a time, week after week, for twenty-seven years. By any conservative accounting he read and reported on more than three thousand books in that tenure. Authors and publishers whose books turned up in the column spoke of having been Levinized, a verb they had invented for the occasion. After The Times had just returned from a 114-day newspaper strike, Levin reviewed thirty-eight books at once. It remains, so far as anyone can find, the single largest bundle of reviews ever published under one byline in an American newspaper. The volume did not mean a lack of discernment. In 1962 he rhapsodized over Bruce Jay Friedman's Stern and praised Ken Kesey's debut, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, at a length that startled Kesey's own editors. The book he told his son he loved best was Claude Simon's The Wind (1959); Simon won the Nobel Prize twenty-six years after Levin's review.