Janet Lewis

Janet Lewis was an American novelist, poet, librettist, and Broadway performer, born on August 17, 1899, in Chicago, Illinois, to Elizabeth Taylor Lewis and Edwin H. Lewis. She died on December 1, 1998, at her home in Los Altos, California, at the age of 99.

Lewis attended the University of Chicago, where she became part of a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and the poet and critic Yvor Winters. It was Winters who encouraged her to join the University of Chicago Poetry Club, of which he was a founding member and secretary. She and Winters married in 1926, and together they established Gyroscope, a literary magazine that ran from 1929 to 1931. Lewis went on to teach at both Stanford University in California and the University of California at Berkeley.

Her fiction spans several decades, beginning with her first novel, The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary's, published in 1932. Her subsequent novels include The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), a story centered on deception and cowardice, The Trial of Soren Qvist (1947), and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959). A collection of short fiction, Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories, appeared in 1946.

As a poet, Lewis focused on imagery, lyricism, and rhythm. Her poetry collections include The Indians in the Woods (1922), Poems, 1924–1944 (1950), and Poems Old and New, 1918–1978 (1981). She also worked extensively as a librettist, writing three libretti and several song texts for composer Alva Henderson, as well as a libretto for The Wife of Martin Guerre, set to music by William Bergsma in 1956.

Lewis appeared on Broadway in 1938 in Murder in the Cathedral. In 1992, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.