Barbara Kiefer Lewalski

Barbara Josephine Lewalski (; February 22, 1931 – March 2, 2018) was an American academic, an authority on Renaissance literature particularly known for her work on John Milton.

Early life

Born in Topeka, Kansas, to John Kiefer, a farmer, and Vivo , an elementary schoolteacher and speech therapist, she received her BSE at Emporia State University in 1950 and her AM in 1951. She went on to earn a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1956.

Career Her first book, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained, has been praised as a "trail-blazing" work that marshals "great learning in the service of understanding a specific artefact, without swamping the artefact." and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1986.

Lewalski died in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of 87. She had congestive heart failure and died of a heart attack on March 2, 2018.

Works Milton's Brief Epic (1966) Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (1973) Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century English Lyric (1979) Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985) Writing Women in Jacobean England (1993) (editor) The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght (1996) The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2000) (editor) John Milton, Paradise Lost (2007)