Levé was self-taught as an artist and studied business at the elite École supérieure des sciences économiques et commerciales.

[4][5] Levé traveled in the United States in 2002, writing Autoportrait and taking the photographs for the series Amérique,[6] which pictures small American towns named after cities in other countries.

[4][5] Autoportrait consists entirely of disconnected, unparagraphed sentences of the authorial speaker's assertions and self-description,[4][5] a "collection of fragments" by a "literary cubist.

[4] A chapter in Hervé Le Tellier's novel Enough About Love pays homage to Edouard Levé, who appears as the character Hugues Léger, and to his book Autoportrait, the introspective and fragmentary style of which is imitated in an extract of a book titled Definition.

Gérard Gavarry's book Expérience d'Edward Lee, Versailles (P.O.L., 2009) takes as its inspiration one hundred photos by Levé.