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Obituary: Professor R. W. B. Lewis Gifted Yale literary critic and biographer of Edith Wharton

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 20020619
Author:Andrew Rosenheim

EVEN IN the country of its origin, American writing only attained academic respectability in the second half of the 20th century. Although seminal work had been produced by F.O. Matthiessen at Harvard before the Second World War, it was really only in the 1950s that talented American critics and scholars were willing (and allowed) to base their careers on the indigenous literature.

Prominent among these was R.W.B. Lewis, whose book The American Adam appeared in 1955. Its thesis was simple but powerful: the major works of American literature were predicated on the assumption that American ...

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