W. S. (Wilmarth Sheldon) Lewis

Born in Alameda, California, in 1895, W. S. Lewis attended the Thacher School and graduated from Yale in 1918. Yale archival and library sources describe him as a scholar, author, editor, and collector whose life’s work centered on the eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole and the wider world of Georgian Britain.

Together with his wife, Annie Burr Lewis, he spent decades building an extraordinary collection of books, manuscripts, prints, and objects connected to Walpole. That collection became the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, later given to Yale, and it remains a major center for research.

Lewis also wrote and edited important work of his own, including studies of collecting and Walpole scholarship, and Yale credits him as the guiding force behind the monumental Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s correspondence. He died in 1979, leaving behind both influential books and a library that carried his enthusiasm for literary history into the future.