R. W. B. Lewis

Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis (November 1, 1917- June 13, 2002) was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for biography,[1] the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and a Bancroft Prize for his biography of Edith Wharton. The New York Times called the book "a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in shade during her life" and said that the "expansive, elegant biography ... can stand as literature, if nothing else."

He was the Neil Gray Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, where he taught from 1959 until his retirement in 1988; from 1966 to 1972, he was master of Yale's Calhoun College. From 1954 to 1959 he taught at Rutgers–Newark. In 1988 Lewis received a Litt.D. from Bates College. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Lewis received its Gold Medal for Biography in 2000.

Lewis is generally considered one of the founders of the academic field of American Studies, and was regarded as one of the finest Americanists of his generation. His interests ranged from criticism of American and European writers, to biography and even artistic criticism.

Lewis' career as critic involved him in the lives of many influential American and European thinkers and writers. Lewis received his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. He and his wife and sometime co-author, Nancy, later became close friends with the Southern writer Robert Penn Warren.

Lewis' first major work, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), explored De Crèvecoeur's idea of the American as a "new man" - an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Lewis portrayed this preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind that shaped the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age.

The book traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue, Lewis exposes its continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

Lewis' father and maternal grandfather were Episcopalian priests. He graduated from Harvard College in 1939 and received an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1941, only to volunteer for war service in 1942 before continuing his graduate studies. After returning from serving in the British-U.S. intelligence service known as "M.I. X" in Italy in World War II he pursued his fascination with world literature, already awakened by his Harvard teachers. Lewis developed a lifelong fascination and love for Italy after visiting as a child, and later serving in Tuscany during the war, including a harrowing stint behind enemy lines. He and his wife Nancy visited there regularly for much of their lives, and Lewis later wrote a book on the city of Florence.

While teaching at Yale, Lewis lived in a house in Bethany, Connecticut. He worked in an octagonally-shaped writing studio situated in a ravine about 30 feet from his house. A railed walkway connected the house to the studio, which was built by Nancy Lewis' brother-in-law, Isham McConnell, who studied under the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Lewis continued to write his books on a typewriter into his later years.

Bookshelves lined the walls of Lewis' office, with each section containing works from Lewis' various areas of research: the James' family, Edith Wharton, Dante and Italy, American literature, etc.

In 2006, the Yale College Writing Center was endowed with a directorship in Lewis' name.

"This position in Dick Lewis’ name will serve as a permanent tribute to a writer who made every subject he engaged in memorable and to a memorable teacher who made every student mindful of great writing,” said Yale President Richard C. Levin in a University press release.

Personal life

Lewis married Nancy Lindau in 1950. They had three children: Nathaniel (born 1960), who is also a literary historian at Saint Michael's College; Sophie (born 1965), a health expert with the government of Massachusetts; and Emma (born 1967), an environmental lawyer. Lewis also had a son by the Danish writer Elsa Gress; this is the historian David Gress.

Works written

Works edited

References

  1. ↑ Michael Anderson, "R. W. B. Lewis, Biographer and Critic, Is Dead at 84", The New York Times, June 15, 2002.

External links