author
Elisabeth R. Lewis
A little-known voice from 1950s science fiction, remembered today for the eerie short story Know Thy Neighbor. Her work has also been kept in circulation through later anthologies that spotlight women writers of the era.
1 Audiobook
Know Thy Neighbor
by Elisabeth R. Lewis
About the author
Elisabeth R. Lewis is a fairly obscure author, and only a small amount of reliable biographical information is easy to confirm. What does stand out is her place in 1950s science fiction: library and catalog records consistently identify her as a science fiction writer, and her best-known surviving work is Know Thy Neighbor.
That story originally appeared in the February 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, a major magazine of the genre, and it later became widely available again through Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, and other public-domain or archival listings. More recent book records also connect her name with Women Resurrected: Stories from Women Science Fiction Writers of the 50's, showing that her work continues to be associated with efforts to recover and celebrate women writers from that period.
Because dependable personal details are scarce, it is safest to remember her mainly through the fiction itself: tense, unsettling, and part of the rich magazine culture that helped define mid-century science fiction.