Lloyd Lewis: an outstanding figure in the American literary world

              Myths After Lincoln

Chicago; The History of Its Reputation

Sherman; Fighting Prophet


Author
Biographer
Lecturer
A New Historian Who Revalues America's Past from a Modern Yet Human Viewpoint.

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LLOYD LEWIS
An Outstanding Figure in the American Literary World
REDPATH BUREAU




LLOYD LEWIS
LLOYD LEWIS' genius in unearthing new and dramatic facts about the personages of the Civil War era, and in describing them with vividness, eloquence and sustained power, has been an outstanding discovery of the past four years in the American literary world.

His first volume, Myths After Lincoln aroused a storm of controversy by its forceful presentation of the American folk-ways which made a demi-god of the martyred president.  H. L. Mencken, editor of The American Mercury was the first critic to hail the new author and to discern his place among the new historians who are revaluing America's past.

Mr. Lewis' second literary achievement was Chicago; the History of Its Reputation written in colaboration with Henry Justin Smith, and widely praised for its exciting narration of the city's adventures in history.

Following the six years of research and investigation which went into these volumes, Mr. Lewis began his preparation for a biography of General William T. Sherman.  Working in Paris, in Washington, central Ohio, Illinois, New York and many parts of the South, the author was able to assemble a mass of hitherto unpublished or all-but-forgotten detail about not only his subject but the whole Civil War.  Anecdotes, unconventional happenings, secret events were all gathered across three years of research.  It was Mr. Lewis's thesis that no life of Sherman could be written without a complete study of the folk-ways of his soldiers, and his volume Sherman; Fighting Prophet has been widely praised not only for its clear and vivid portrait of the man but of the men who marched with him to the sea.

Published on December 5, 1932, Sherman; Fighting Prophet was made the December selection of the Book of the Month Club, as well as being named by The Outlook as the best book of that month.  It became immediately a best seller and it has remained in that category.

Lloyd Lewis is of Welsh and English Quaker stock, his ancestors on both parental sides having come to America in the days of William Penn.  His great-grandfather Lewis migrated from Philadelphia to Pendleton, Indiana, in a covered wagon in 1832, homesteaded and cleared the farm upon which Mr. Lewis was born.

Growing up in this Quaker atmosphere, Mr. Lewis received a common and high school education in Indiana, an A.B. degree at Swarthmore College and entered journalism immediately after graduation.  He has since then been a feature writer on Philadelphia and Chicago newspapers, an advertising writer and, for the past two years dramatic critic of The Chicago Daily News.

Some ten years ago Mr. Lewis began digging into original sources, the diaries, the letters, the documents of Lincolniana and the War, and his attitudes arise from first-hand research.

His newest investigations are into the folk-ways and customs of America in the 1860s, '70s and '80s.



What Leading Critics Say About Mr. Lewis and His Sherman

Chicago Tribune (Fanny Butcher)
Sherman; Fighting Prophet unquestionably one of the great American biographies.


The American Mercury (H. L. Mencken)
A capital book.  Full of sly and sardonic humors.  Very adroitly and effectively written.


The Christian Science Monitor
Sherman is beautifully proportioned—an indispensable addition to the literature of the Civil War.


New York Herald-Tribune (Herman Brickell)
A biography of first importance.  The material is magnificent.


The Nation (M. R. Werner)
Written with admirable thoroughness, with clarity of insight, and with sympathetic understanding.


Chattanooga Times (Gilbert E. Govan)
Sherman is a great work about a great man; it stands well above any other American biography that 1932 has thrown into my hands.



What Mr. Lewis Will Talk About
SHERMAN, GRANT AND LINCOLN

The personalities and secret political maneuverings of Lincoln, Grant and Sherman dramatically and pointedly described, with incidental anecdotes and revaluations of military history in terms of folk-ways.

OSCAR WILDE IN AMERICA

A humorous, searching and realistic picture of the domestic life of the country during the 1880s in contrast with the personality of the artistic, sensational Wilde at 26.  The Irish poet's most pungent epigrams, many of them unknown to literature, have been collected by Mr. Lewis from the newspapers of that day.