Lewis, Elizabeth Foreman

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LEWIS, Elizabeth Foreman

Born 24 May 1892, Baltimore, Maryland; died 7 August 1958

Daughter of Joseph F. and Virginia Bayly Foreman; married John A. Lewis, 1921

Elizabeth Foreman Lewis was born and raised in Baltimore and educated in the public schools there. She also attended the Tome School and studied art at the Maryland Institute. In 1916, having moved to New York, she studied religion and literature for a year at the Biblical Seminary of New York. Then, under the auspices of the Methodist Women's Mission Board, she went to China. For a year she worked in the offices of the Mission Board and taught evening classes in religious education in Shanghai. She was transferred to Chungking, where she taught in the district school in 1918 and 1919, and then to Nanking, where she taught in the Huei Wen School for Girls and in the Boys Academy. In 1921, Lewis married the principal of the Boys Academy, the son of the former Methodist Bishop of China. They had one son; her husband died in 1934.

The years in China left Lewis with a knowledge and a love of the culture and the people that became the major force in her life. Forced by illness to return to the U.S., she began writing fictionalized sketches of life in China, with an eye to publishing them in magazines such as St. Nicholas. One such story, concerning the arrival of a young boy and his mother in the city of Chungking, became the nucleus of Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze (1932), her first novel and winner of the Newbery Award for 1933.

This first novel contains all the major elements of Lewis' vision: a disrupted and disintegrating Chinese culture, a representative of Western influence (here a foreign doctor), and a young Chinese who seeks to understand the collision of old and new, and who finally becomes a symbol of their successful union. When the fatherless Young Fu demonstrates that he has learned piety, prowess, and perspicacity, he is rewarded with a father—his master Tang, the coppersmith, who offers to adopt him. This essentially romantic vision of life is as much a part of Lewis' art as her Chinese settings.

Though Lewis' accuracy as an observer of Chinese ways is beyond suspicion, her greatest strength as a children's author is in her real and sympathetic characters whose universal needs, desires, and motives transcend national boundaries. Her young heroes want to be a part of a family, to feel that they are contributing members of the family and the wider society, and to feel that they are competent. The universality of their aspirations was important to Lewis, whose hope for Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze was that, reading it, "the youth of America might recognize in the youth of China a kinship to themselves."

Lewis' books take place in the cities she knew along the Yangtze—Chungking, Shanghai, and Nanking. The time period is that of the Open Door Policy, the civil war between the republican forces of Sun Yat-sen and the war lords of the north, and the beginnings of the second Sino-Japanese conflict. In the early books, Young Fu and Ho-Ming, Girl of New China (1935), the cultural ferment that accompanied Westerners into China is central. Labor agitation, especially against foreign concerns, is important, as is the Chinese resentment of Western science and Western religious thought. The literary renaissance, during which the written language was simplified to make it more easily learned by the lower classes, figures in the burning desires of Young Fu and Ho-Ming to "do books" and the importance of literacy as a symbol to the young delinquents of To Beat a Tiger (1956).

Being essentially stories of character, Lewis' books bear the passing of time gracefully. In addition, the stories, the notes, and the glossaries are excellent sources of information about life in precommunist China. Although the Western bias is evident throughout, Lewis' books communicate a real love for the country and culture of China and a real sympathy for the Chinese people.

Other Works:

China Quest (1937). Portraits from a Chinese Scroll (1938). Test Tubes and Dragon Scales (with G. C. Basil, 1940). When the Typhoon Blows (1942).