American · 1917–2002
R. W. B. Lewis (Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, 1917-2002) was an American literary critic, biographer and professor. Born in Chicago, he studied at Harvard and taught at Bennington, Rutgers and, from 1964, Yale, where he was a leading figure in American literary studies. His first major book, The American Adam (1955), argued that nineteenth-century American writers shaped a hero who stood outside history and inherited sin, and it became a founding work of American Studies. He followed it with The Picaresque Saint (1959) and Trials of the Word (1965), which looked at modern fiction and criticism. His biography Edith Wharton (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize. He also wrote The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1991), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and edited Dante and Wharton volumes. His work shaped how scholars read American literature as a conversation between innocence and experience.