H. H. Lewis
| Harold Harwell Lewis | |
|---|---|
H.H. Lewis, undated. Image courtesy of
Special Collections and Archives, Southeast Missouri State University |
|
| Born |
January 13, 1901 Cape Girardeau, Missouri, United States |
| Died | January 24, 1985 (aged 84) Chaffee, Missouri |
| Pen name | H.H. Lewis |
| Occupation | Writer, Laborer |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1930s to 1960s |
| Genre | Poetry and Essay |
| Subject | Social and Political Commentary |
| Literary movement | Modernism |
H.H. Lewis (1901–1985) was a Communist American poet during the 1930s thru the 1970s.
Harold Harwell Lewis, or H.H. Lewis as he became known, was born January 13, 1901, near Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He was one of four children born to Thomas and Catherine Tisdale Lewis.
He received his secondary education at the Southeast Missouri State Normal School--Third District Training School, which is now named Southeast Missouri State University. During the Great Depression, Lewis traveled as a common laborer in the Southwest. Away from his parents for the first time, Lewis was incredibly poor and many of his encounters and experiences traveling would fuel his future career.
He eventually returned to the family farm to pursue a career of freelance writing, including publishing his own magazine, The Outlander. For a brief period in the 1930s Lewis enjoyed a small measure of acclaim. Malcolm Cowley in The New Republic in 1932 called him "the red-starred laureate, the Joe Hill of the Communist Movement." An editor of Partisan Review, in a testy exchange with Lewis, called him "a necrophilic son of a cretin." He was heralded as a rising star of proletarian literature by V. F. Calverton and editors of the Soviet publication, International Literature, Lewis seemed destined to stir up controversy.
H.H. Lewis had a close friendship with famous writer William Carlos Williams, to whom Lewis represented a fresh and vigorous voice in the search for the "low-down Americano," or common man. With such support, both magazines began to published Lewis's prose and poetry in the 1930s, including Mencken's The American Mercury, Jack Conroy's The Anvil, The New Republic, and numerous others. In 1937, Lewis's poetry won the prestigious Harriet Monroe Literary Prize. His poem, "," first published in Poetry, was anthologized in the 1952 edition of Oscar Williams's A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry but dropped from subsequent editions.
...
Wikipedia