R. Lewis

An American literary scholar and critic, R. W. B. Lewis (1917–2002) taught at Yale University and became widely admired for writing that made literary history feel lively and personal. He wrote about American culture with a broad, curious mind, and his criticism reached well beyond the classroom.

He is especially remembered for Edith Wharton: A Biography, which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, along with the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bancroft Prize. He also wrote The American Adam, an influential study of nineteenth-century American literature, as well as books on Florence, Henry and William James, and Dante.

What stands out in his work is the balance of scholarship and readability. Whether he was writing biography, criticism, or cultural history, he had a gift for making complex writers and ideas approachable for general readers.