Herbert Clyde Lewis (15 August 1909 - 17 October 1950 [1] ) was an American novelist.
Lewis was born in New York City, the son of Hyman and Clara Lewis, Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants. [1]
He lived in China, working as a reporter on the Shanghai Evening Post in 1930 and on The China Press, Shanghai, in 1931 and 1932. [2]
He returned to New York City and married Gita Jacobson in December, 1933. They had two children, Michael and Jane. [3]
He worked as a reporter for the New York Journal , but quit to work as an independent writer. [4] Although he sold several stories to Esquire , he was forced to declare bankruptcy by the time he sold his first novel, Gentleman Overboard, to the Viking Press in 1937. [5]
He moved to Hollywood and worked as a scenario writer for MGM in 1937. [6] He contributed to the screenplay for the 1939 film Fisherman's Wharf and wrote the original story for Escape to Paradise . He returned to New York City in 1939 and worked for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. [4] He returned to reporting, joining the news staff of the New York Herald Tribune in 1942. [7]
He returned to Hollywood in 1942 after 20th Century Fox bought the film rights to his story,Two-Faced Qulligan for $25,000. The story was originally published in Story . [7] It was filmed in 1945 as Two-Faced Quilligan . His story D-Day in Las Vegas was made into the movie Lady Luck (1946), and he contributed to the screenplay for Free for All (1949), which was based on his story, Patent Applied For.
His most notable accomplishment in Hollywood was his story The Fifth Avenue Story, which he sold to the director Frank Capra. Capra in turn sold it to Roy Del Ruth, who filmed it in 1947 as It Happened on 5th Avenue . Lewis and his co-writer, Frederick Stephani, were nominated for the 1947 Academy Award for Best Story. They lost to Valentine Davies, who won for Miracle on 34th Street .
Lewis suffered a nervous breakdown in 1948 and was unable to work for a year after. He returned to New York in 1949 and was working as a contributing editor of Time magazine when he died of a heart attack. [4]
Lewis published three novels between 1937 and 1940. Gentleman Overboard was a black comedy about a Wall Street banker who falls overboard while travelling on a freighter in the South Pacific and drowns. Time magazine's reviewer wrote of the book, "His hair-raising little tour de force is the more effective for being so quietly, matter-of-factly written." [8]
His second novel, Spring Offensive, was an anti-war piece that depicted the sufferings of an American serving in the British Army who becomes trapped between lines on the day of the first German assault on the Maginot Line. At the time of its publication, the Phony War was still going on along the French-German border, but within weeks the German Blitzkrieg attack on France and the Low Countries took place and the novel was quickly forgotten.
His third novel, Season's Greetings, follows the inhabitants of a Greenwich Village rooming house on a Christmas Eve. Its theme is “the problem of loneliness in a city of eight million people,” as one character puts it.
Lewis' last novel, Silver Dark, which tells the story of a romance between two people with physical deformities, was published posthumously in 1959 by Pyramid Books. Budd Schulberg praised it as "A genuinely interesting and compelling novel".
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. was an American science fiction author best known for the 1965 novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for his novels, he also wrote short stories and worked as a newspaper journalist, photographer, book reviewer, ecological consultant, and lecturer.
James Branch Cabell was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles-lettres. Cabell was well-regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when they were most popular. For Cabell, veracity was "the one unpardonable sin, not merely against art, but against human welfare."
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).
Lost Horizon is a 1937 American adventure drama fantasy film directed by Frank Capra. The screenplay by Robert Riskin is based on the 1933 novel of the same name by James Hilton.
Ronald Charles Colman was an English-born actor, starting his career in theatre and silent film in his native country, then immigrating to the United States and having a highly successful Hollywood film career. He starred in silent films and successfully transitioned to sound, aided by a distinctive, pleasing voice. He was most popular during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. He received Oscar nominations for Bulldog Drummond (1929), Condemned (1929) and Random Harvest (1942). Colman starred in several classic films, including A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Lost Horizon (1937) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). He also played the starring role in the Technicolor classic Kismet (1944), with Marlene Dietrich, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. In 1947, he won an Academy Award for Best Actor and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for the film A Double Life.
John Phillips Marquand was an American writer. Originally best known for his Mr. Moto spy stories, he achieved popular success and critical respect for his satirical novels, winning a Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley in 1938. One of his abiding themes was the confining nature of life in America's upper class and among those who aspired to join it. Marquand treated those whose lives were bound by these unwritten codes with a characteristic mix of respect and satire.
Henry Kuttner was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer.
Philip Gordon Wylie was an American writer of works ranging from pulp science fiction, mysteries, social diatribes and satire to ecology and the threat of nuclear holocaust.
Charles Langbridge Morgan was a British playwright and novelist of English and Welsh parentage. The main themes of his work were, as he himself put it, "Art, Love, and Death", and the relation between them. Themes of individual novels range from the paradoxes of freedom, through passionate love seen from within and without, to the conflict of good and evil and the enchanted boundary of death (Sparkenbroke). He was the husband of Welsh novelist Hilda Vaughan.
Garson Kanin was an American writer and director of plays and films.
Dawn Powell was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone." Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings, Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in an 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.
Niven Busch was an American novelist and screenwriter of movies such as the acclaimed The Postman Always Rings Twice. His novels included Duel in the Sun (1944) and California Street (1959). He was married to actress Teresa Wright for ten years beginning in 1942.
Jonathan Wyatt Latimer was an American crime writer known his novels and screenplays. Before becoming an author, Latimer was a journalist in Chicago.
Robert Riskin was an American screenwriter. He is best known for his collaborations with Frank Capra.
Clyde Wilfred Cook was an Australian-born vaudevillian who went on to perform in Hollywood and whose career spanned the silent film era, talkies and television.
Clyde Brion Davis was an American writer and freelance journalist active from the mid-1920s until his death. He is best known for his novels The Anointed and The Great American Novel, though he wrote more than 15 books.
John Sanford or John B. Sanford, born Julian Lawrence Shapiro, was an American screenwriter and prose writer who wrote 24 books. The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature describes him as, "Perhaps the most outstanding neglected novelist." A one-time member of the Communist Party, after he and his wife Marguerite Roberts refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, they were blacklisted and unable to work in Hollywood for nearly a decade.
The Neglected Books Page is a book review website. The site features reviews of books that have been, according to the site, "neglected, overlooked, forgotten, or stranded by changing tides in critical or popular taste." The site was founded in 2006.
Paul Hervey Fox was an American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He wrote several films during the pre-Code era and Hollywood golden age, including Mandalay (1934), Grand Finale (1936), The Last Train from Madrid (1937), Safari (1940), A Gentleman at Heart (1942), and The Stars Are Singing (1953). He also published several novels and short stories, and wrote five Broadway plays.
