![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2023\/01\/turlish-lew-1998.webp\")
Born and raised in South Philadelphia, Lew was the grandson of an immigrant coal miner and son of a baker for Acme Supermarkets. His family obituary describes his childhood as a \u201cmixture of hours spent reading in the Free Library of Philadelphia and time making mild mischief in streets he would later recognize in the seminal film Rocky<\/em>. This combination of pursuing curiosity about wide-ranging topics and taking a somewhat irreverent approach to life comprised the essence of his character.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A consummate teacher of English literature who specialized in 19th-century American literature and modernist literature written between World War I and World War II, Lew taught more than 20 different Bates courses, from \u201cJoyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>,\u201d \u201cThe Waste Land<\/em> and After,\u201d and \u201cMajor American Writers to 1900\u201d to \u201cBeatniks and Mandarins: A Literary and Cultural History of the American \u201950s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n His late faculty colleague Werner Deiman once described Lew as \u201cone of the liveliest and most gifted teacher-scholars on this campus,\u201d whose \u201centhusiastic and devoted\u201d students \u201cpay him the appropriate compliment by responding to his inspiration with intellectual fervor, energy, and challenge.\u201d One of Lew\u2019s students wrote that he \u201cbreathes life into each piece of literature he presents and instills in every student a hunger for knowledge that I know I will never lose.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He earned a summer research award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972 and a Andrew Mellon Fellowship in 1976\u201377. Writing in American Literature in 1971, he was the first scholar to suggest that Tom Buchanan\u2019s dialogue about civilization \u201cgoing to pieces\u201d in The Great Gatsby<\/em> is a reference to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard\u2019s The Rising Tide of Color<\/em>, published in 1920. Lew was an early advocate for the possibilities of the college\u2019s Short Term. In the 1980s, he directed the college\u2019s summer Elderhostel program, noting that the older students who came to Bates brought \u201ca certain sense of wonder to their quest for knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Lew\u2019s classroom, \u201cone always was reminded of a speculative question or a story that would make an evening or morning memorable.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n A jazz lover, he regaled fellow enthusiasts during a lunchtime gathering in 2007, shortly before his retirement, described by Bates Magazine<\/em><\/a> as \u201cscenes from a life, with a soundtrack by Mingus and Bird…. Philadelphia of the 1950s, the Beat writers, and the golden days of jazz.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing Lew\u2019s retirement citation in 2008, Associate Professor of English Sanford Freedman described his colleague\u2019s teaching as \u201cgracious, generous, witty.\u201d In Lew\u2019s classroom, Sanford said, \u201cone always was reminded of a speculative question or a story that would make an evening or morning memorable.\u201d As a faculty colleague, Lew was \u201ca diligent and efficient chair, a fine listener (a skill honed no doubt by his years as secretary in faculty meetings!), unflappably steady and good-humored, and an excellent teacher.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sanford added, \u201cMany on the faculty and staff have remarked how Lew went out of his way, sometimes in small almost imperceptible ways, to make people feel valued and welcomed as a colleague or a friend. We will always be grateful to this man who kept before us Henry James or Walt Whitman or Robert Frost or Elizabeth Bishop, or compared (in exhaustive detail) our outlooks on the Red Sox\u2019s prospects for the coming summer, which in those days were always hopeful but iffy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He is survived by his wife, Molly; daughters Cora and Hannah; two grandsons; a sister, Susan; several nieces and nephews; and their families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2022 To read the complete obituary for Lewis Turlish, please visit: https:\/\/bit.ly\/lewis-turlish<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n