Levitt was born in 1925 in Vollmerz. A decade later his family moved to Dayton, Ohio. He served in World War II, received his high school diploma through correspondence school and then earned a bachelor's at Antioch College and a Ph.D. in economics at Ohio State University. His first teaching job was at the University of North Dakota.[2]
In 1959 he joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School. Later that year, he became world-renowned after publishing Marketing Myopia in Harvard Business Review where he asks "What business are you in?", a phrase that demands one account for the significance of the job one does