Lew Sarett

Write the text of your article here! Lew R. Sarett (May 16, 1888) was an [[American poetry|American poet], academic, and lecturer.

Life
He was born Lewis Saretsky' in Chicago, the only child of Rudolph and Jeanette (Block) Saretsky, immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, respectively. The family moved in 1895 to Marquette, Michigan, and in 1902 to Benton Harbor, Michigan, where Sarett graduated high school. He attended the University of Michigan (1907-1908), Beloit College (receiving a B.A.] in 1911), Harvard Law School (1911-1912) and the [[University of Illinois Law School (which awarded him an LL.B. in 1916).

From 1912 to 1920 he taught English and Public Speaking at the University of Illinois. In 1914 he married Margater Husted, who would bear him two children. He also began to write poetry during this time, and published his first collection, Many Many Moons, in 1920. In 1921 he briefly served as an advisory editor of Poetry magazine.

In 1920 Sarett transferred to Northwestern University, where he would teach for the next 30 years. In 1925 he moved to the wilderness of Wisconsin, commuting 300 miles to Northwestern to teach for one semester a year. Serving as an adviser on Native affairs for the Department of the Interior, he lived among the Chippewa of the Lake Superior region, who adopted him and gave him the name Lone Caribou. He also worked as a part-time National Parks ranger in Montana and Wyoming, and as a wilderness guide in northern Minnesota and Canada. In addition, he worked as a horticulturist, and produced six new varieties of dahlia.

In his time at Northwestern Sarett published five more collections of poetry (three of which had forewords by Carl Sandburg). He also co-authored the college textbook Basic Principles of Speech (which ran through 3 editions between 1936 and 1966), and the secondary-level text Speech: A High School Course.

Margaret Sarett died in 1941. In 1943 Sarett married Juliet Baxter (who died in 1945), and in 1946 he married Alma E. Johnson. In 1950, due to ill health, he took a three-year leave of absence from Northwestern, and retired in 1953 at its end. He died a year later.

Poetry

 * [[Many Many Moons (1920); The Box of God (1922); Slow Smoke (1925); Wings Against the Moon (1931); and The Collected Poems of Lew Sarett (1941),