Philip Levine, a former US Poet Laureate whose works portrayed the lives of working-class people—including his own—died on Saturday of pancreatic and liver cancer in Fresno, California. He was eighty-seven.

“Anyone who held a degrading job,” said David Fenza of AWP, “or anyone whose family knew persecution, felt a strong affinity to his work and its tough spirit of refusing to buckle under. He was a model of what public universities can do in elevating the poor and working class and thereby enlarging our literature with new voices and overlooked realities. He became a mentor to many of those voices.”

Levine, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, grew up in Depression-era Detroit, and, starting at age fourteen, held a series of industrial jobs. He worked in a soap factory, bottling plant, Chevrolet Gear and Axle, and Detroit Transmission, where he performed extensive manual labor, like hauling around cases of soft drinks and operating jackhammers.

Levine discovered poetry around the same time he began working. When he went off to college at Wayne State University—the first in his family to receive a college education—he immersed himself in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Stephen Crane.

“I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own,” he said.

Levine received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at Wayne State, and in 1957, earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where the poet John Berryman became Levine’s mentor.

“He seemed to feel I had something genuine,” Levine said to the Paris Review in 1988, “but that I wasn’t doing enough with it, wasn’t demanding enough from my work. He kept directing me to poetry that would raise my standards.”

Levine’s first collection, On the Edge (Stone Wall Press), was published in 1963. He went on to publish many books, including nonfiction and translations of Spanish poets, and his last poetry collection was News of the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

A former board member of AWP, Levine received numerous awards for his work. The Simple Truth (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991) received the 1991 National Book Award; Ashes: Poems New and Old (Atheneum, 1979), received the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first American Book Award for Poetry; 7 Years from Somewhere (Antheneum, 1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Names of the Lost (1975) which won the 1977 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, and several others.

Levine was an emeritus professor of English at California State University, Fresno, where he taught from 1958 to 1992. He served as Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2012. He is survived by his wife and three sons.

Read Levine’s final poem in The New Yorker, “By the Waters of Llobregat,” which appeared in the magazine three months ago.