Janet Lewis

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Janet Lewis (1899 - 1998) was an American author.

Lewis, born in Chicago, Illinois, and a graduate of the University of Chicago, taught at both Stanford University in California, and at the University of California at Berkeley.^[1]

She wrote The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) which is the tale of one man's deception and another’s cowardice. It is a novel that was on the 2005 and 2004 English exam for Australian students. It is considered a hard topic to write on even though it relates more to modern life than first realised. The tale is written in old world language that at times is difficult for "inexperienced" readers to comprehend. Her first novel was The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnson Family of St. Mary's (1932). Other prose works include The Trial of Soren Qvist (1947), The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959), and the volume of short fiction, Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories (1946).^[2]

Lewis was also a poet, and concentrated on imagery, rhythms, and lyricism to achieve her goal.^[3] Among her works are The Indians in the Woods (1922), and the later collections Poems, 1924-1944 (1950), and Poems Old and New, 1918-1978 (1981).^[4]

She married to American poet and critic Yvor Winters in 1926. Together they founded Gyroscope, a literary magazine, which lasted from 1929 until 1931.^[5]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ PoetryFoundation.org Archive [1]
2. ^ Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources--American Literary Studies: Janet Lewis Papers [2]
3. ^ PoetryFoundation.org Archive [3]
4. ^ Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources--American Literary Studies: Janet Lewis Papers [4]
5. ^ Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources--American Literary Studies: Janet Lewis Papers [5]