At the close of his autobiographical essay “The Girl in the Drugstore” (1969), Norman Levine defines his dilemma as a Jewish Canadian writer as follows: “I had to recognize that one of the conditions of my being a writer is of living in exile. I felt it in Canada, as the son of orthodox Jewish parents in Ottawa; then as the poor boy among the rich at McGill. And now I feel it as a Canadian living in England” (Levine 1993b, 140). In June 1949, the need to distance himself from his Jewish as well as his Canadian heritage caused Levine to leave his native Canada and to settle permanently in Europe. Over the course of the next three decades, this self-imposed exile in England allowed Levine to thoroughly examine the origins of his alienation in both fictional and autobiographical writings. Although long exiled from Canada, Levine has never severed the strong ties to his homeland and is recognized today as a Canadian writer of international standing, particularly for his short fiction. In fact, Levine's well-crafted stories have been favorably compared to the works of such masters of the short-story genre as Anton Chekhov and Ernest Hemingway.

In his writings, produced over a period of more than half a century, Levine frequently draws on personal experiences, which he then incorporates into his fictional worlds. As he writes in his introduction to the short-story collection Champagne Barn (1984), “the stories form a kind of autobiography. But . . . it is autobiography written as fiction” (Levine 1984b, xv). Born in October 1923, Norman Albert Levine grew up in Ottawa's Lower Town as the son of orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland. Because his first language was Yiddish, he did not speak a word of English when he began at public school at the age of five. Levine later attended the High School of Commerce but soon left to become an office boy at the Department of National Defense. During the Second World War, he served as a pilot officer with a Lancaster squadron of the RCAF based at Leeming in Yorkshire. Returning to Canada after the war, Levine studied English language and literature at McGill University and graduated with an M.A. in 1949.