Richard M. Levine is an American journalist and author. He is best known for Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County, his 1982 book about the murders of Jim and Naomi Olive. Bad Blood received positive reviews. Greil Marcus, writing in Rolling Stone, argued that "from the beginning of this tale through to its aftermath, the people caught up in its momentum are thrown back on themselves. That is what makes the story Bad Blood has to tell so terrible, and so compelling" Kirkus Reviews wrote that it was a "chilling, fascinating reconstruction" and "a first-class study of a set of American dreams gone wrong." The New York Times, while slightly less enthusiastic, praised "the richness of its detail and the remarkable intimacy with which we get to know its characters."
Early life and education
Born June 19, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, Richard Michael Levine was the eldest of three children of businessman Bernard Levine and homemaker Gertrude Cohen Levine. The family moved to Great Neck on Long Island when he was a child, and he graduated from Great Neck North High School in 1959. He attended Wesleyan University, graduating with a BA in literature in 1963. He continued his education at the Russian Institute of Columbia University, where he received his MA in Slavic languages and literature in 1966. While at Columbia, he received a Fulbright scholarship, which enabled him to study at the University of Warsaw and the University of Krakow in Poland.
Career
Levine has contributed to Rolling Stone, New York, Painted Bride Quarterly, Esquire, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Times. His 1969 essay "Jesse Jackson: Heir to Dr. King?," published in Harper's Magazine," has been reprinted numerous times. In addition to being a freelance journalist, he has been a contributing editor and columnist at Esquire, as well as a staff writer and editor at Newsweek and the Saturday Review. He has also taught at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1977, he was awarded an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship. His mentors have included American journalist and historian David Halberstam and author/editor Willie Morris. In 2015, Levine published a book of poetry and a book of short stories. He was a 2016 finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Poetry.
