R. W. B. Lewis

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

Lewis received numerous honors for his research and contributions, including a grant for literary achievement from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, plus honorary degrees from several universities. He was invited to serve on both the National Book Award jury for fiction, on which he was charged with selecting the best novel of 1964, and on the 1977 jury for biography and autobiography. In 1988 he was one of 14 scholars chosen to advise the National Endowment for the Humanities on the state of American culture.

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' 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 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James and others, and in his epilogue Lewis exposes its continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

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, the historian David Gress.

Lewis taught at Bennington College 1948-1950, and was dean of studies at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria 1950-1951. He was a visiting lecturer at Smith College 1951-1952 and a resident fellow at Princeton University in 1952-1954, then joined the faculty at Rutgers University as a professor of English until his Yale University appointment in 1959. In 1977 he was appointed the Neil Gray, Jr. Professor of English and American Studies, reflecting his abiding interest in American literature and American cultural life.

Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Beatrix Elizabeth (Baldwin) and Leicester Crosby Lewis, an Episcopal minister. After preparing at Episcopal Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy, he earned his B.A. in 1939 at Harvard University and his M.A. in 1941 at the University of Chicago, where he also received a Ph.D. degree in 1954. In the meantime he volunteered for war service in 1942, enlisting as a private in the U.S. Air Force and becoming a second lieutenant, serving in the Middle East, North Africa, and Italy, commanding a unit in Tuscany, Italy,serving in the British-U.S. intelligence service known as "M.I. X" and receiving the Legion of Merit Award in 1944 for service behind enemy lines, After the war, he continued as a commanding officer of the Northern Italy War Crimes Investigation Team and was discharged from service in 1946 with the rank of major.

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 or Autobiography, 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."