Edwin Herbert Lewis, rhetorician, novelist, and poet, was born in Westerly, Rhode Island, in 1866. He received an A.B. and A.M. from Alfred University in 1887, a Ph.D. in Latin from Syracuse University in 1892, and in 1894 was awarded the first Ph.D. in English by the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago, he was successively a Fellow in English (1892-1893), Assistant in Rhetoric (1893-1894), Associate in Rhetoric (1894-1895), Instructor in English (1895-1896), and Associate Professor of Rhetoric (1896-1899). During this period, he completed his first works for publication: his dissertation, The History of the English Paragraph (1894), A First Book in Writing English (1896), and An Introduction to the Study of Literature (1899).