Janet Lewis

Janet Loxley Lewis (August 17, 1899 – December 1, 1998) was an American novelist, poet, and librettist. She was considered one of the finest American literary figures of the 20th century.

Biography Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois to Elizabeth Taylor Lewis and Edwin H. Lewis. She was a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she was a member of a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and her future husband Yvor Winters. She joined the University of Chicago Poetry Club on the advice of Winters, who was a founding member and, at the time, secretary. Lewis taught at both Stanford University in California and the University of California at Berkeley.

She wrote The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) which is the tale of one man's deception and another's cowardice. Her first novel was The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary's (1932). Other prose works include The Trial of Soren Qvist (1947), The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959), and the volume of short fiction, Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories (1946).

Lewis was also a poet, and concentrated on imagery, rhythms, and lyricism to achieve her goal.

She married the American poet and critic Yvor Winters in 1926. Together they founded Gyroscope, a literary magazine that lasted from 1929 until 1931. She died at her home in Los Altos, California, in 1998, at the age of 99. The Last of the Mohicans, opera in two acts after the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, music by Alva Henderson (1976) The Swans, opera in three acts after the Brothers Grimm, music by Alva Henderson (1986) later incorporated as Act II of West of Washington Square