Loewinsohn earned his BA from Berkeley in 1967 and his PhD from Harvard in 1971 with a dissertation on the early poetic development of William Carlos Williams.
Loewinsohn Joined the English Department faculty at UC Berkeley in 1970, where he spent the remainder of his career. His first novel, "Magnetic Field(s)," was one of five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1983.