He began to draw as a child, displaying a precocious talent that, at the age of nine, won him an invitation to audition for an animator's position in Disney's Los Angeles Studios.

[3] Levine later studied painting at Pratt Institute, at Temple University's Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1946, and with Hans Hofmann.

[1] Levine initially hoped to be a full-time painter, but was often forced to subsist on illustration work from publications like Gasoline Retailer.

The paintings, in contrast to his illustrations, are "sympathetic portraits of ordinary citizens, fond and respectful renderings of the distinctive seaside architecture, panoramas with people on the beach.

Within a few days, he would return a finished drawing that caught "a large fact about his subject's character"; "his brilliance lay in weaving [the article's] ideas with his own".

[1] John Updike, whom Levine drew many times, wrote in the 1970s: "Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not panicked, a comic art ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of publicity as well as those historical devils who haunt our unease.

"[5] The New York Times described Levine's illustrations as "macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates" that were "heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o'clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles ... to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg".

"[1] Levine drew his most frequent subject, former president Richard M. Nixon, 66 times, depicting him as, among other things, the Godfather, Captain Queeg, and a fetus.

He was survived by his second wife, Kathy Hayes (whom he married in 1996), two children, Matthew and Eve, two stepchildren, Nancy and Christopher Rommelmann and grandchildren.