H. H. Lewis

Harold Harwell Lewis, or H.H. Lewis as he become known, was an American poet and communist during the 1930s through the 1970s. He was one of four children born to Thomas and Catherine Tisdale Lewis on January 13, 1901, near Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

He received his secondary education at the Southeast Missouri State Normal School Training School, which is now named Southeast Missouri State University. During the Great Depression, Lewis traveled as a common laborer in the Southwest. Away from his parents for the first time, Lewis was incredably poor and many of his encounters and experiences traveling would fuel his future career.

That "stove-devil," heat-blanched and heat-crazed, gaunt and flagrantly dirty, up against it for twelve hours daily, received $60 per month. The waiters got $1.25 per day. The restaurant belonged to a chain of such for dime-gripping bums and low-paid working-stiffs. Came gringos and greasers for coffee and stew, hash, beans—a large bowl of brown beans for a dime. Came Negroes, humblest of all. Came "mouthmen" and "wolves," proletarian beasts of the ghastliest ilk. From the poverty of America, in this bottomless hell, came these contorted and condemned souls.

— H.H. Lewis on his slide into poverty. Found in the Anvil, 1933

He eventually returned to the family farm to pursue a career of freelance writing, including publishing his own magazine,The Outlander..

H.H. Lewis had a close friendship with famous writer William Carlos Williams, to whom Lewis represented a fresh and vigorous voice in the search for the "low-down Americano," or common man. With such support, both magazines began to published Lewis's prose and poetry in the 1930s, including Mencken's The American Mercury, Conroy's The Anvil, The New Republic, and numerous others. In 1937, Lewis's poetry won the prestigious Harriet Monroe Literary Prize..

Git plumb outta breath,
Git strangled to death
On de T-bones in de sky?

— H.H. Lewis lines from "Tractors Eat Kerosene"

The Missouri farmhand poet and Communist essayist wrote both poetry and prose on the condition of Native Americans, African-American, and sharecroppers that were unique at the time of his creating them. Lewis tried to embrace the voice of the people, writing in the vernacular as well as writing in a style commonly refered to as Grammar B. His writings were translated into Japanese, French, German, and Russian and he was widely praised and popular in the Soviet Union for his proletarian and revolutionary sympathies.

After several unsuccessful attempts to secure a Guggenheim Fellowship to support research on sharecroppers, Lewis devoted the rest of his life to exposing subversive threats to his country at home and abroad..