R. W. B. Lewis

Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis (1917-2002) was an American literary scholar and critic, born in Chicago, who became one of the founders of American Studies with his seminal work The American Adam (1955). He won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bancroft Prize for his biography Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975), among other honors including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Gold Medal for Biography. Lewis taught at Yale University as the Neil Gray Professor of English and American Studies from 1959 to 1988 and served as master of Calhoun College.