Good-bye, Son and Other Stories

Janet Lewis was a novelist, poet, and short-story writer whose literary career spanned almost the entire twentieth century. The New York Times has praised her novels as "some of the 20th century's most vividly imagined and finely wrought literature." Born and educated in Chicago, she lived in California for most of her adult life and taught at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Her works include The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Sören Qvist (1947), The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959), Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories (1946), and Poems Old and New (1982).

“Any consideration of the writing of Janet Lewis becomes inevitably a consideration of style. In Good-bye, Son, she exhibits a classical purity that is rare.” (New York Times) “The collection may remind you of some of the quiet stories of Willa Cather.” (The New Yorker) “(Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories) is … an unaccountably neglected book, a collection [that explores] the apprehension and experiencing of death, and the consolatory power inherent in understanding one’s place and part in the natural cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.” (Christian Science Monitor) “(Janet Lewis) is a striking example of a quiet talent working quietly through almost the entirety of a noisy, celebrity-heavy century.” - Larry McMurtry (New York Review of Books) “[Lewis] thrusts us into the essence of a situation, startling us out of the role of complacent observer and into that of active participant. This steady movement and these brief revelations work together to give the stories a collective meaning.” - Deanna L. Kern Ludwin (Western American Literature) “Janet Lewis…has now written some very fine short stories, of which at least one (‘Good-bye, Son,’ the title story or novelette), I predict will live a long time, not only in memories, but in the anthologies of outstanding short prose in which it is bound to turn up. It is a story not easily classifiable among the different kinds of supernatural tales; it is, in essence, a story of divine guidance, and as such has nothing but the appearing of the dead in common with the usual ‘ghost story.’” - L. T. Nicholl (Weekly Book Review)