R.W.B. Lewis, the literary critic and Yale scholar who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his biography of Edith Wharton, died Thursday at his home in Bethany, Conn. He was 84.
Mr. Lewis taught English and American studies at Yale from 1959 to 1988, but his knowledge and interests ranged over American and European literature and history. He established his scholarly reputation with his first book, “The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the 19th Century,” a seminal work in the evolving discipline of American studies.
He achieved equal distinction in literary criticism before a late career shift brought him perhaps greater eminence as a biographer. “Edith Wharton: A Biography” was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of literary biography by critics and scholars.
Along with the Pulitzer Prize in biography, the book received the Bancroft Prize for American history and the first National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. It also revived critical and popular interest in Wharton, whose novels “The Age of Innocence” and “The House of Mirth” were later adapted as films.
Mr. Lewis’ book on the family of Henry, William and Alice James, “The Jameses: A Family Narrative,” was a finalist for the National Book Award.
In recognition, Mr. Lewis was awarded a gold medal for biography in 2000 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He had been elected to the academy in 1982.
The son of an Episcopal minister, Mr. Lewis graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Renaissance history and literature, and received his master’s degree in late medieval and Renaissance cultural history from the University of Chicago in 1941.
He served in Army intelligence in World War II in North Africa and the Middle East. In Italy, he served in a joint effort with British military intelligence to round up escaped Allied prisoners of war.
He was discharged in 1946 and resumed his studies at the University of Chicago, but with radically different interests. While stationed in Italy in the last months of the war, he read “Moby-Dick.”
“Culturally speaking, it turned me around,” Lewis later wrote, making him “wonder for the first time about the phenomenon of being an American.” The result was his doctoral thesis, which became “The American Adam.” It argued that the defining myth of the United States “was that of the authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history.”
Mr. Lewis traced how writers and intellectuals “rejoiced in and deplored” this “ideal of newborn innocence,” a cultural theme that he said had persisted in novels like Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” and Saul Bellow’s “Adventures of Augie March.”
Mr. Lewis taught at Bennington College from 1948 to 1950 before serving as dean of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies from 1950 to 1951. He then taught at Smith College from 1951 to 1952 and at Rutgers University from 1954 to 1959, before moving to Yale.
Survivors include his wife, Nancy; a son, two daughters and two granddaughters.
