Alfred Henry Lewis

Biography

Alfred Henry Lewis, noted journalist and author, was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1855, the son of Isaac Lewis, a carpenter. When Lewis was quite young his family moved to Painesville, Ohio. Alfred H. Lewis married in Richfield, Ohio in 1879 to Miss Alice Ewing, the daughter of Dr. A. E. Ewing. Lewis was educated as a lawyer and began to practice in Cleveland. From 1879 to 1881 he was a police prosecutor in that city. While still a lawyer, Lewis began to dabble in newspaper work as a Cleveland police reporter. About 1882, he moved west to Kansas City, and from there traveled in the southwest collecting frontier lore from the colorful characters of Kansas, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The cowboys and miners Lewis met in his western travels became the dominant figures in his books. His first western sketches were printed in Kansas City newspapers. They were stories of the "Old Cattleman," signed "Dan Quin," his pseudonym. Lewis was a prodigious worker. In 15 years he produced 18 works, many of which were widely popular. He specialized in western stories and tales of the New York underworld. Among his most popular books were the "Wolfville" series, "The Sunset Trail", Episodes of Cowboy Life", "Peggy O'Neil", and "The Boss". By 1890, Lewis was an established journalist, a writer of political articles, by which he established a reputation as one of the foremost political writers of the country. In the newspaper field Lewis was best known as Washington correspondent of the Chicago Times and New York Journal. He was a regular contributor to Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan and other magazines. In 1896 Lewis became the Washington correspondent for the Hearst newspapers and held that position for two years. He then became editor of "The Verdict," a humorous weekly, but soon turned his attention again to fiction and political writing for the Hearst newspapers. In his later years, he was described as a short, squatty man with a square chin. He was noted for the prodigious amounts of coffee he drank each day. Two of his brothers, Irving and William, controlled the publication of the New York Morning Telegraph, a theatrical daily newspaper. He died at the age of 59 from an intestinal disorder on December 23, 1914 in Manhattan, New York. He was survived by his wife, Alice and his two brothers. Like Bret Harte and Mark Twain, he first came into prominence through his stories of the west. It is probable he caught the spirit and vernacular of the latter-day West more accurately than any writer of his era. He had a host of imitators, but it was he that set the pace in rich humor and measured pathos and simple human nature.