Two Yale faculty members, David Bromwich and R.W.B. Lewis (emeritus), were recently honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for their literary achievements.
Bromwich, the Bird White Housum Professor of English and director of the Whitney Humanities Center, received the Academy Award for Literature. The award, which recognizes the body of the recipient’s work, is made every two years and carries a prize of $7,500.
Lewis, the Neil Gray Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, received the Gold Medal for biography, an award that is given only once every six years.
A respected authority on Romantic and modern poetry and literary criticism, Bromwich is the author of “Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s,” “Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking” and “Hazlitt: The Mind of the Critic,” among other major works. He has co-edited the textbook “Literature as Experience” and the anthology “Romantic Critical Essays” and is a frequent contributor to academic journals. His editorials and reviews often appear in such publications as The New York Times, The New Republic and New York Review of Books. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Bromwich holds his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Yale and was the Mellon Professor of English at Princeton before joining the Yale faculty in 1988.
Lewis is perhaps best known as the author of “Edith Wharton: A Biography,” for which he received the 1976 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. The list of books he has written also includes “The American Adam,” in 1955, “The Picaresque Saint” (1958), “Trials of the Word” (a collection of essays) (1965) and “The Jameses: A Family Narrative” (1989). His 1968 work, “The Poetry of Hart Crane,” helped to establish the poet’s stature as a major figure of modern American literature. Lewis has edited or co-edited and contributed commentary to such widely read collections as “The Letters of Edith Wharton,” “A Melville Reader” and “American Literature.”
His most recent book, “American Characters” — a joint venture with his wife, Nancy Lewis — combines pictures of historical American figures from the National Portrait Gallery with “literary portraits” of them by their often equally illustrious contemporaries. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of Lincoln and Walt Whitman’s of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, are among the word portraits in “American Characters,” which was published by Yale University Press in 1999.
Lewis, who had a joint appointment in the American Studies and English departments, retired in 1988 after teaching at Yale for 28 years. He is already a member of the Academy.
Founded in 1898 as the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Academy is an honorary society of preeminent American writers, composers, painters, sculptors and architects. Its original members included Henry Adams, Childe Hassam, Mark Twain, William and Henry James and — for their literary achievements — future presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Membership is limited to 250 native or naturalized U.S. citizens noted for outstanding achievements in their respective fields. The Academy also has an honorary membership of 75 foreign artists, writers, and composers to strengthen cultural ties with other countries. Election to membership in the Academy is considered the highest recognition of artistic merit in this country. Located at 155th Street in New York City, the Academy fulfils its mission of promoting the arts by offering prizes to individual artists, holding exhibitions, putting on performances of original work, and maintaining a museum and a library of some 23,000 volumes. It also purchases paintings by American artists for distribution to museums.
Honorary members, whose work fits in none of the specific categories officially recognized by the Academy, include film-makers Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese and stage director and playwright Robert Wilson. In addition to R.W.B. Lewis, six other Yale faculty members are fellows of the Academy: critic Harold Bloom, poets John Hollander and J.D. McClatchy, composer Ezra Laderman, writer Peter Gay and architect Cesar Pelli. The late C. Vann Woodward was also a member.
