Levi Asher
Encyclopedia
Levi Asher is a New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

-based writer, blogger and web developer responsible for Literary Kicks
Literary Kicks
Literary Kicks is a website that functions as a digital library of poetry and prose, biography and cultural criticism chiefly focused on Beat Generation writers...

, one of the earliest popular literary websites and now the oldest continuously-running literary website on the Internet. Other works by Levi Asher include Queensboro Ballads, a series of stories and essays in the form of a 1960s folk-rock album, Coffeehouse: Writings From The Web, the first anthology of online writing, Notes From Underground, a digital movie version of the Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....

 novel, Action Poetry, a compilation of writings from Literary Kicks, and The Summer of the Mets
METS
The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard is a metadata standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library, expressed using the XML schema language of the World Wide Web Consortium...

, a novel. He has three children, Elizabeth, Daniel, and Abigail, and is married to Caryn D. Stein.

Having maintained Literary Kicks continuously since 1994 (with brief pauses in 2000 and 2004), Levi Asher is now recognized as a pioneer of the online literary scene and one of the earliest proto-bloggers. As a professional web developer (using the name Marc Eliot Stein), Asher has also built or collaborated on music websites for Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam, and has worked for seminal Silicon Alley companies like iVillage
IVillage
iVillage, Inc. is a media company that is owned by NBCUniversal. The site focuses on categories targeted at women, including Food, Health, Entertainment, Family, Beauty & Style. Additional businesses and brand extensions within iVillage Networks include iVillage UK, NBC Digital Health Network,...

 and Time Warner's Pathfinder.com
Pathfinder.com
Pathfinder was one of the first Internet portals, initially created as Time Warner's entry onto the Internet. It was supposed to be an all-encompassing site that brought the best content from all of Time-Warner under one banner.The site opened in 1994...

. In 2009 Asher wrote for Literary Kicks a serialized memoir of the Internet industry from 1993 to 2003, focusing on his personal struggles, failures and successes during the during the crazy years before, during and after the dot-com stock bubble (1995 to 2000) and crash (2000 to 2003), as well as own his own experience as part of the Internet's growing literary scene.

Asher was born in Flushing, Queens and grew up in Old Bethpage and Hauppauge, Long Island. He attended the State University of New York at Albany, graduating in 1984 with degrees in Philosophy and Computer Science. Before working as a web developer, he worked as a C++ programmer at the JP Morgan bank on Wall Street in New York City. His first published story, Jeannie Might Know, a satire about his job at JP Morgan, appeared in the early online journal Intertext in 1993. He later explained in his memoir that he changed his name to Levi Asher to avoid being detected by co-workers.

Asher has also written for the Huffington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Guardian and Jewcy.

Published works

  • Coffeehouse Writings for the Web, Editor (Manning ,1997)
  • The Summer of the Mets
  • Action Poetry
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