RWB Lewis

Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis (born November 1, 1917 in Chicago , Illinois ; died June 13, 2002 in Bethany , Connecticut ) was an American literary scholar . He is one of the most influential authors of the first generation of Americanists.

Lewis, son of an Episcopalian pastor, studied at Harvard University (BA 1941), later at the University of Chicago (MA 1941; Ph.D. 1954). 1950–1951 he was dean of the Salzburg seminar , subsequently he taught at Princeton University from 1952–1954 and received a professorship at Rutgers University in 1954 and was called to Yale University in 1959 , where he remained until his death. In 1982 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

His debut work The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the 19th Century , published in 1955, had some influence on American studies , which established itself as an independent academic discipline in the 1950s (" The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the 19th Century Century "), in which he formulated a myth that underlies many works of American literature, especially Romanticism: the idea of ​​the American as a blank slate, freed from the conventions and constraints of European society, similar to the biblical Adam in a almost paradisiacal innocence takes his fate in a new Eden - the new world - in hand and masters his life independently.

In addition to numerous other contributions to American literary history, his biography of Edith Wharton deserves particular mention, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 . Lewis' book did a lot to upgrade this neglected novelist; In the course of his research on this book, Lewis also discovered some hitherto unknown letters and prose fragments from Wharton's pen.

Works

• The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955)
• The Picaresque Saint. Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction (1959)
• Herman Melville (1962)
• Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (1965)
• The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study (1967)
• American Literature: The Makers and the Making: Book C / 1861 to 1914 (1974; with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren )
• Edith Wharton (1975)
• The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1991)
• Literary Reflections: A Shoring of Images 1960-1993 (1993)
• The City of Florence: Historical Vistas and Personal Sightings (1995)
• American Characters: Selections from the National Portrait Gallery, Accompanied by Literary Portraits (1999, with Nancy Lewis)
• Dante (2001)

Editing

• Presence of Walt Whitman (1962)
• Malraux: A Collection of Critical Essays (1964)
• The Letters of Edith Wharton (1989, with Nancy Lewis)
• The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (1991)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Members: RWB Lewis. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 9, 2019 .