Barbara Kiefer Lewalski

Born in Topeka, Kansas, to John Kiefer, a farmer, and Vivo (), an elementary schoolteacher and speech therapist, she received her BSE at Emporia State University in 1950 and her AM in 1951. She went on to earn a PhD at the University of Chicago in 1956. == Career ==

Her first book, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained, has been praised as a "trail-blazing" work that marshals "great learning in the service of understanding a specific artefact, without swamping the artefact." and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1986. Lewalski died in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of 87. She had congestive heart failure and died of a heart attack on March 2, 2018. ==Works==

• ''Milton's Brief Epic'' (1966) • ''Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode'' (1973) • Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century English Lyric (1979) • Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985) • Writing Women in Jacobean England (1993) • (editor) The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght (1996) • The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2000) • (editor) John Milton, Paradise Lost (2007) ==References==