Herbert Clyde Lewis

Herbert Clyde Lewis (15 August 1909 - 17 October 1950 ) was an American novelist.

Life Lewis was born in New York City, the son of Hyman and Clara Lewis, Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants.

He returned to New York City and married Gita Jacobson in December, 1933. They had two children, Michael and Jane.

He worked as a reporter for the New York Journal, but quit to work as an independent writer. Although he sold several stories to Esquire, he was forced to declare bankruptcy by the time he sold his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, to the Viking Press in 1937.

He moved to Hollywood and worked as a scenario writer for MGM in 1937. He contributed to the screenplay for the 1939 film Fisherman's Wharf and wrote the original story for Escape to Paradise. He returned to New York City in 1939 and worked for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.

He returned to Hollywood in 1942 after 20th Century Fox bought the film rights to his story,Two-Faced Qulligan for $25,000. The story was originally published in Story. Ansgar Allen, in his review of the book following republication in 2021, referred to the narrative as remarkable for its flat emotion and detachment in the face of the desperation of a drowning man.

His second novel, Spring Offensive, was an anti-war piece that depicted the sufferings of an American serving in the British Army who becomes trapped between lines on the day of the first German assault on the Maginot Line. At the time of its publication, the Phony War was still going on along the French-German border, but within weeks the German Blitzkrieg attack on France and the Low Countries took place and the novel was quickly forgotten.

His third novel, Season's Greetings, follows the inhabitants of a Greenwich Village rooming house on a Christmas Eve. Its theme is “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people,” as one character puts it.

Lewis' last novel, Silver Dark, which tells the story of a romance between two people with physical deformities, was published posthumously in 1959 by Pyramid Books. Budd Schulberg praised it as "A genuinely interesting and compelling novel".