Lever Bros. \1e-var\ British soap and detergent manufacturer. Lever Bros, was founded in 1885 by William Hesketh Lever, later Viscount Leverhulme (1851-1925), and his brother, James Darcy Lever, to make and sell soap. The first company to market wrapped bars of soap made from vegetable oil instead of tallow, Lever Bros, expanded internation¬ ally with the help of energetic advertising slogans. It built a model indus¬ trial village at Port Sunlight in 1888 and offered employee benefits such as profit sharing and free insurance. William was elected to Parliament in 1906 and became a viscount in 1922. In 1929, Lever Bros, joined an association of European companies to form Unilever.
Levertov, Denise (b. Oct. 24, 1923, Ilford, Essex, Eng.—d. Dec. 20, 1997, Seattle, Wash., U.S.) English-born U.S. poet, essayist, and politi¬ cal activist. Levertov became a civilian nurse during World War II. She married an American writer after the war and moved to the U.S., where she was associated with the Black Mountain group, which included the poets Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Influenced by the deliberate simplicity of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, she wrote deceptively matter-of-fact verse on both personal and political themes. Among her poetry collections are Here and Now (1957), The Sorrow Dance (1967), and The Freeing of the Dust (1975).
Levesque \la-'vek\, Rene (b. Aug. 24, 1922, New Carlisle, Que., Can.—d. Nov. 1, 1987, Montreal, Que.) Canadian politician. He joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1946, became a war corre¬ spondent in Korea in 1952, and was a television commentator from 1956 to 1959. Elected to the Quebec legislature in 1960, he joined the admin¬ istration of Jean Lesage. In 1967 he cofounded a separatist group that com¬ bined with others to form the Parti Quebecois. In 1976 his party won control of the Quebec assembly, and he became premier. He proposed an independent Quebec in economic union with the rest of Canada, an arrangement he called “sovereignty-association.” In 1980 his plan was rejected by the Quebec electorate. He resigned in 1985 because of fail¬ ing health.
Levi \'le-,vl\ In ancient Israel, the third son of the patriarch Jacob. Levi became head of the clans of religious functionaries known as Levites. Unlike the 12 tribes of Israel, the Levites were given no allotment of land when Canaan was conquered. They are thought to have performed sub¬ ordinate services associated with public worship, serving as musicians, guardians, Temple officials, judges, and craftsmen.
Levi Vla-veV Primo (b. July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy—d. April 11, 1987, Turin) Italian writer and chemist. Two years after obtaining a degree in chemistry, Levi, who was Jewish, was captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz as a slave labourer. His autobiographical works —If This Is a Man, or Survival in Auschwitz (1947), The Reawakening (1963), and The Drowned and the Saved (1986)—are restrained and moving accounts of and reflections on survival in the Nazi camps. His best-known work, The Periodic Table (1975), is a collection of 21 meditations, each named for a chemical element. The lingering effects of his wartime trauma may have led to his suicide.
Levi \la-'ve\, Sylvain (b. March 26, 1863, Paris, France—d. Oct. 30, 1935, France) French scholar of Eastern religion, literature, and history. He taught at the Sorbonne (1889-94) and later for many years at the College de France (1894-1935). In 1929, with Takakusu Junjiro, he published a clas¬ sic dictionary of Buddhism. His other writings include the standard treatise The Indian Theater (1890), Nepal (1905-08), and India and the World (1926); he also carried out pioneering studies of the Tocharian languages.
Levi-Strauss \'la-ve-'straus\, Claude (b. Nov. 28, 1908, Brussels, Belg.) Belgian-French social anthropologist and leading exponent of struc¬ turalism. Levi-Strauss originally studied philosophy at the University of
Leucothea giving Dionysus a drink from the Horn of Plenty, antique bas-relief; in the Lateran Museum, Rome
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Paris (1927-32) but went on to teach sociology at the University of Sao Paulo (1934-37) and to conduct field research on the Indians of Brazil. At the New School for Social Research in New York City (1941^15) he came under the influence of the linguist Roman Jakobson; he came to view culture as a system of communica¬ tion, analogous to a language, and constructed models based on struc¬ tural linguistics, information theory, and cybernetics to interpret them. He attempted to identify universal struc¬ tures of the mind as reflected in myths, cultural symbols, and social organiza¬ tion. From 1950 to 1974 he was director of studies at the Ecole Pra¬ tique des Hautes Etudes, and in 1959 he joined the faculty of the College de France. Among his major works are The Elementary Structures of Kin¬ ship (1949), Tristes tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1961, vol. 2, 1973), and the four-volume Mythologiques (1964—71).
Levi Strauss & Co. Leading U.S. manufacturer of casual and active clothing, noted especially for its blue denim jeans. The company traces its origin to Levi Strauss (1829-1902), a Bavarian immigrant who sold dry goods to miners during the California gold rush. Hearing of the min¬ ers’ need for durable pants, he hired a tailor to make garments out of tent canvas, later substituting denim. In 1873 he and an associate received a patent for the copper riveting they used to strengthen their pants. The company’s most spectacular growth occurred after 1946, with the deci¬ sion to concentrate wholly on manufacturing clothing under its own label. In 1959 it began exporting, and during the 1960s Levi jeans became enor¬ mously popular worldwide. The company went public in 1971 and was returned to private control (by Strauss’s descendants) in 1985.
Levinas, Emmanuel (b. Dec. 30, 1905 [Jan. 12, 1906, Old Style], Kaunas, Lith.—d. Dec. 25, 1995, Paris, France) French philosopher. He studied at the Universities of Strasbourg and Freiburg and received a doc¬ torate in philosophy from the Institut de France in 1928. His philosophi¬ cal work in the 1930s helped to introduce the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to France. Levinas’s best-known work, Totality and Infinity (1961), is a highly original phenomenological inves¬ tigation of ethics and the self that takes as its starting point the face-to- face encounter between the “I” and the “Other.” Extensively developed in Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence (1974) and other writings, this analysis challenged Western philosophical tradition by treating eth¬ ics rather than ontology as “first philosophy.” Levinas was also the author of religious studies, including Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (1963) and Nine Talmudic Readings (1990).
Levine \b-'vln\, James (Lawrence) (b. June 23, 1943, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.) U.S. conductor. He debuted as a pianist at age 10 with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. At Juilliard he studied piano with Ros- ina Lhevinne (1880-1976) and conducting with Jean Morel (1903-75). He was assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1964 to 1970. A guest appearance conducting Tosca (1971) led to his appointment as principal conductor (1973) and later music director (1975) and artistic director (1986) of the Metropolitan Opera. He built the flagging Met orchestra into a virtuoso ensemble and became recognized as one of the world’s greatest conductors. He served as director of Chicago’s Ravinia Festival from 1973 to 1993.