Janet Lewis is best known for her four historical novels, critical and popular successes published between 1932 and 1959. The first and least acclaimed, The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s (1932), shared with her early poems an interest in Native American life and the American wilderness. Three others, of which The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) and The Trial of Sören Qvist (1947, 1959) are probably the best known, deal in a lucid, documentary style with historic cases of circumstantial evidence. Lewis’s fictional prose reflected her apprenticeship in Imagistic poetry—a narrative style that, in her own words, is “supposed to be transparent.”

Lewis also published a novel with a contemporary setting, Against a Darkening Sky (1943), and a collection of contemporary short stories, Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories (1946), as well as children’s books. She adapted The Wife of Martin Guerre as an opera, produced in 1956 by the Juilliard School of Music and subsequently at other schools. She wrote two other opera librettos, The Swans (pb. 1986) and The Legend (pb. 1987).

In a career that spanned eight decades, Janet Lewis won a number of honors for her literary work, including the Friends of American Writers award in 1932 for The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s, a Shelley Memorial Award for poetry in 1948, and a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California in 1948 for The Trial of Sören Qvist. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing for research in Paris from 1950 to 1951, won a Horace Gregory Foundation award in 1977, a Silver Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California in 1982 for Poems Old and New, 1918-1978, a University of Chicago Alumni Association Award for Professional Achievement in 1982, a Discovery Award/PEN (West) in 1982, and finally, a Robert Kirsch Award for body of work from the Los Angeles Times in 1985.