Oscar Levant grew-up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh one of many siblings born of an Orthodox Jewish Russian family.  Music almost immediately became part of his life as he studied with his brother followed by some of the most extraordinary music teachers of that era.

By the time Levant was 12, he was already doing concerts.  His mother recognized his talent and soon moved to New York City where she knew that Levant could have access to the greatest musicians available.

As a young adult, Levant had developed an opinionated personality and became well known for his acerbic wit and quick response.  Influenced by the glamour and appeal of Broadway, Levant hired out has a pianist in the orchestras of the many neighborhood nightclubs in the area.  Despite his Broadway engagements, he continued to attend mainstream classical musical events.  Levant was known as a bon vivant in popular music circles, and involved in the seamier side of New York society, developing acquaintanceships with a variety of the city’s mobsters.  Levant became a member of the Algonquin Round Table, the exclusive circle of New York wits and writers that met regularly at the Algonquin Hotel and included such celebrities as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott.

It wasn’t long before Levant was attracted to the glitter of Hollywood where he became a prominent member of the music scene and where he developed a close friendship with legendary composer George Gershwin. The association resulted in a profound musical relationship. He was still keeping his foot in the New York music scene, mainly on Broadway and on Tin Pan Alley.  He also returned to some concertizing (1930 and 1931) at two large venues: the Hollywood Bowl and Lewisohn Stadium in New York.

After Gershwin's untimely death, Levant was immediately crowned sole interpreter and virtuoso performer of Gershwin's music, the beginning of a 20-year reign. That same year Levant started his "Suite for Orchestra" and finished its orchestration by early 1938. That October, he returned to the east to debut as a Broadway conductor while replacing his brother Harry for 65 performances of George S. Kaufman and Lorenz Hart's "The Fabulous Invalid".

Levant returned to concertizing in all the big American cities, showcasing not only Gershwin’s "Concerto in F" and the "Rhapsody in Blue", but also a whole repertoire including works of his own, including his two 1940 pieces "Caprice for Orchestra" and "A New Overture and Polka for 'Oscar Homolka'" (the actor). "Caprice" was particularly showcased by British conductor Thomas Beecham. But these were his last major concert works. Nevertheless, this marked a decade of concertizing, radio broadcasts and recording significantly with Columbia Records and great conductors such as Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, Andre Kostelanetz, Wallenstein, Efrem Kurtz and Morton Gould.

Infrequently Levant appeared in film in a showcase piano piece, but there are only a handful of film roles where he showed his considerable skill as an actor. He played himself in the Gershwin bio Rhapsody in Blue (1945), highlighted by his playing of the piece. He was still himself but convincingly in character in one of his best dramatic roles as wisecracking concert pianist Sid Jeffers in Humoresque (1946) with John Garfield and Joan Crawford. He went into the studio to record a set of excerpts from Richard Wagner's "Tristan" arranged for piano, violin, and orchestra with violinist Isaac Stern, and conductor Franz Waxman as part of the sound track for the film. He was able to play two of his favorite pieces (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Piano Concerto No. 1" and Aram Khachaturyan's "Sabre Dance") when he got around to doing the sophisticated comedy The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. A few years later he did his last two films. In An American in Paris (1951) the focus was on Gene Kelly, but a close second was Gershwin's music, the title of the movie taken from his brilliant montage of movements visualizing Paris. In his final film Levant is a caricature of himself mixed with the film's co-screenwriter, Adolph Green. This was the comedy musical The Band Wagon (1953) in which friend Fred Astaire was also a caricature of himself as a legendary but essentially washed-up song and dance man who has a stellar comeback. 

Levant’s increasingly glib and incisive tongue had evolved from earlier life-of-the-party witty repartee to self-deprecating dialogue. His remarks bordered, and often flowed over into, rudeness and sometimes only slightly veiled attacks. He seemed unable to resist putting down his own musical efforts, a compulsion to parody himself, revealing his insecurities and a rather knee-jerk need to be funny and play the clown at his own expense.

During the height of his concertizing, Levant was the highest paid concert performer, but after 1951 he canceled many commitments, which finally brought a temporary ban by the American Federation of Musicians. There were still occasional concerts in the 1950s, one of the most memorable being Royce Hall at UCLA (1958) when he launched into the first movement of the second piano concerto of Dmitri Shostakovich only to forget his place and stop, turning to the audience and quipping, “I don't even know where I am. I'm going to start all over again". He did, and with great success. His final public effort that same year was the "Concerto in F" in which it took all the encouragement of conductor Andre Kostelanetz to keep Levant from simply stopping mid-course and walking off stage. Levant prefaced his encores with the quip that he was "playing under the auspices of Mt. Sinai" (the Los Angeles hospital famous for servicing the stars).

That statement was unfortunately true. Along with real and imagined illnesses, Levant's mental state, always fragile at best, developed into classic stage fright. By this time he was long-addicted to prescription drugs and was in and out of the hospital on a regular basis. His faithful second wife of 33 years, actress/singer June Gale, had to commit him to mental institutions on several occasions. Yet Levant continued. There was a series of album recordings in the late 1950s. He made the rounds of a few prime-time game shows and late-night TV talk shows, particularly that of friend Jack Parr. Between 1958 and 1960 he had his own prime-time local Los Angeles TV show called "The Oscar Levant Show", which sometimes offered a rather subdued and intimate look at the restless mind of Levant. As a talk show with guests and Levant, usually ringed in a cloud from his chain smoking, playing impromptu pieces on the piano, it was inevitably canceled because of Levant's controversial monologues and off-color, inflammatory remarks about personalities. He wrote three memoirs: "A Smattering of Ignorance" (1940), "Memoirs of an Amnesiac" (1965) and "The Unimportance of Being Oscar" (1968), each incisive as well as outlandish in the context of Levant's lifelong self-analysis and skewed view of humanity. At Wit’s End is based upon Levant’s literary autobiographies.

In the last decade of his life, Levant increasingly retired from any sort of public exposure. An extraordinary individual, composer of critically acclaimed and original music, Oscar Levant was one of the most captivating entertainment mysteries of the 20th century.