LEWIS, Norman 1908-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 28, 1908, in London, England; died July 22, 2003, in Saffron Walden, Essex, England. Author. Lewis was best known as a travel writer, although he also wrote novels and was a photographer and journalist. Enduring an unhappy childhood with a father who invented a bogus medicine and then became a spiritual medium aided by his wife, Lewis was largely raised by aunts living in Wales. When he was older, he worked for his father for a time, then separated from his family to become a wedding photographer. His love of motorcycles fueled his adventuresome nature, and he soon began writing about his travels, publishing Spanish Adventure (1935) and Sand and Sea in Arabia (1938) before World War II. Lewis was also adept at languages, and during the war he served in British Army Intelligence in Algeria, Tunisia, and Italy, where he was a liaison officer. He later wrote about his wartime experiences in Italy in Naples '44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (1974). After the war Lewis continued to travel and write about his journeys in such works as A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Indo-China (1951), The Changing Sky: Travels of a Novelist (1959), and A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India (1991). He was also a productive author of suspense novels, producing The Sicilian Specialist (1974), Cuban Passage (1982), and The Man in the Middle (1984), among others. Though he never won a major literary prize, Lewis was considered by his peers—including the likes of Graham Greene and V. S. Pritchett—to be a talented author who brought remote regions of the planet vividly to life. Unlike most travel writers, he did not dwell on descriptions of beautiful landscapes; instead, he honestly portrayed the often harsh lives of native peoples surviving under difficult circumstances. He also lamented the demise of traditional customs and cultures at the hands of modern industrialization, and as a journalist for newspapers and magazines he reported on examples of political oppression, such as the killing of Amazonian natives by the Brazilian government. The story of Lewis's own life is set down in his Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography (1985), which was revised in 1994 as I Came, I Saw, and The World, the World (1996). Lewis's final book, A Tomb in Seville, was scheduled to be published posthumously.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2003, p. B9.

New York Times, July 25, 2003, p. A19.

Times (London, England), July 23, 2003.