Professor R. W. B. Lewis

Gifted Yale literary critic and biographer of Edith Wharton

Even in the country of its origin, American writing only attained academic respectability in the second half of the 20th century. Although seminal work had been produced by F.O. Matthiessen at Harvard before the Second World War, it was really only in the 1950s that talented American critics and scholars were willing (and allowed) to base their careers on the indigenous literature.

Prominent among these was R.W.B. Lewis, whose book The American Adam appeared in 1955. Its thesis was simple but powerful: the major works of American literature were predicated on the assumption that American "was something entirely new" and correspondingly required a new kind of hero, one "emancipated from history" and in search of freedom, unfettered individualism, and innocence. The American hero, in short, was Adam before the Fall.

In such a literature of innocence, a jejune quality can be found in many of its heroes, from Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo to the near-delinquent Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. But the potentially dreary allegorical basis of these works is enlivened by the tension between these aspirations to innocence and the growing corruption of their new society. To be American for these heroes is, in John Updike's memorable phrase, "not a fact, but an act of faith".

Ironically, Lewis's totemic work on the new world of America had its origins in the Old World of Europe. As a Harvard undergraduate before the war, he received a BA in Renaissance history and literature; and continued with graduate work in medieval and Renaissance history at the University of Chicago before joining the US Army in 1941.

As an intelligence officer, Lewis served in the Middle East and North Africa, before being sent to Italy to help the British to round up escaped Allied POWs. On patrol off the coast, his squad was attacked by Germans and Lewis only managed to escape by swimming to shore, where he was hidden for over a month by Italian families until he walked 70 miles to the Allied lines. Ending the war stationed in Florence, Lewis spent the time reading Moby Dick, and it was this exposure to the Leviathan of American letters which, as he later recalled, made him think for the first time of what "it meant to be an American" and also showed him a power in literature he had previously found only in Dante.

Returning to Chicago after the war, Lewis switched disciplines to reflect his new interests and wrote his dissertation – an embryonic version of The American Adam – under the noted Mark Twain authority Walter Blair. He then pursued a fairly peripatetic teaching career, teaching at Bennington, Smith and Rutgers, as well as serving as the dean of the Salzburg Seminar for two years. It was only in 1959 that he settled down, moving to Yale, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Lewis was one of a galaxy of gifted critics in New Haven, but what he found most attractive about Yale was not simply the calibre of colleagues and students, or the cordial interplay between the English department and the Department of American Studies (he held appointments in both), but also the healthy blending of scholarship, criticism, and "creative writing" that was encouraged among faculty. This mix was exemplified by the writer Robert Penn Warren and unsurprisingly the two became close colleagues, later working with Cleanth Brooks and the young writer David Milch to produce a massive two-volume anthology, American Literature: the makers and the making (1973).

As a teacher, Lewis was liked and respected by students. He was a short man but none the less an imposing figure – squarely built, with a trim beard, shock of white hair, and piercing, hawk-like eyes. He was consistently encouraging to undergraduates, especially to the aspiring writers among them, and was sympathetic to the more radical, being himself firmly if not loudly on the left. He and his wife were generous hosts, and as Master of Yale's Calhoun College in the 1960s his parties were a democratic blend of the famous and the undergraduate unknown. Lewis himself liked a drink or two, once late at night famously demanding (or so the story goes) that a student come down from a tree in the Calhoun courtyard when in fact no student was there.

Lewis's scholarly reputation was broadened by the more critical bent of The Picaresque Saint (1959), a collection of essays, Trials of the Word (1965) and The Poetry of Hart Crane (1968). But increasingly he was drawn to literary biography, and the deposit of most of Edith Wharton's papers in the Beinecke Library at Yale made her a natural object of attention. The result was magisterial: Edith Wharton: a biography won the Pulitzer prize after its publication in 1976 and was instrumental in reviving the fortunes, both in books and films, of this key American novelist. For readers familiar with her only through the Gothic Ethan Frome, the biography came as a revelation, showing not only the complicated richness of her oeuvre but demonstrating as well that, for all her immersion in Europe and the Europeanised life of New York society, Wharton remained as distinctly American in her way as the gutsy rough-hewn novelist Theodore Dreiser.

Drawing on unpublished materials of Wharton, Lewis also showed her simmering sexuality, expressed on paper by the novelist in a few hastily composed sketches of surprisingly frank sexual fantasy, in life through a brief but tumultuous affair with the sinister journalist Morton Fullerton (Lewis's speculation about their relationship was as yet unsupported by evidence; recently, new correspondence between the two shows irrefutably they were lovers as well as friends).

The enormous success of Edith Wharton did little to change Lewis's life. He continued to teach, retiring only in 1988. He continued his foray into biography with a penetrating and fascinating count of the James' siblings – Henry, William, and Alice (The Jameses: a family narrative, 1989). He was particularly adept in showing William James's extraordinarily broad set of interests and talents, too long effaced by the fame of his brother, and Lewis vividly recounted the odd, unhappy life of Alice James.

Lewis's love for Italy was lifelong, and sabbaticals and many holidays were spent there. The City of Florence (1995) was very much a labour of love, but showed Lewis at his best – finding interest in the smallest detail, wearing his learning lightly but to great effect, writing with the unpretentious economy that moved as well as informed.

His final book was Dante (2001), a slim 200-page volume in the series Penguin Lives. Despite the paucity of facts known about Dante's life, or perhaps because of it, Lewis presents a vivid portrait of the writer whose Divine Comedy is really very much the story of his life. "Unassumingly learned", as Robert Pinsky described it, the book brought Lewis full circle back to the original interests of his Harvard undergraduate days, yet its generous suggestion that in our time Robert Penn Warren – critic, poet, novelist – most closely resembled Dante in the multiplicity of literary talents, shows that the geographical and historical diversity of Lewis's interests were all part of a lifetime's consuming passion for literature.

Andrew Rosenheim

Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, writer and teacher: born Chicago 1 November 1917; Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University 1960-77, Neil Gray Professor of Rhetoric 1977-88 (Emeritus); married 1950 Nancy Lindau (one son, two daughters); died Bethany, Connecticut 13 June 2002.