Draft:Lewis Chase

Lewis Nathaniel Chase (June 27, 1873 – September 24, 1937) was an American academic.

Early life
Lewis Nathaniel Chase was born in Sidney, Maine, on June 27, 1873. His parents were Augusta Field and Ethan Allen Chase.

During the mid-1890s, Chase was a Shakespearean actor with the Creston Clarke theatre company.

Chase studied at Columbia University, where he received his bachelor's degree, master's degree and doctorate.

Academic career
In 1899, Chase began working at Columbia University as an assistant and tutor in comparative literature. He remained there until 1902, when he was let go amid financial frictions between comparative literature professor George Edward Woodberry and English professor Brander Matthews.

He then joined Indiana University as a lecturer on literary subjects and became an instructor in English the following year. He later became an assistant English professor at Indiana, but left in 1907 to become a professor of English and director of the University of Louisville's summer session.

Chase continued to teach at a variety of universities, lecturing at the University of Bordeaux in 1909 and teaching contemporary poetry at the University of Wisconsin in 1916. He worked at the University of Rochester from 1917 until 1919, and then served as professor of English studies at the Aligarh Muslim University in India for three years. Before returning to the United States in 1925 to teach at the University of California, he taught at two universities in Beijing.

Back in the United States, Chase taught at the California Institute of Technology in 1926, Union College from 1927 to 1929, Duke University from 1929 to 1931, and Brown University from 1931 until 1933.

Writing career
In 1903, Chase published the book The English Heroic Play. His edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Compensation" was published in 1906 and his Bernard Shaw in France was published in 1910.

Chase published a work on Edgar Allan Poe titled Poe and His Poetry in 1913. In 1937, he and Clyde Kenneth Hyder co-edited an edition of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poems titled The Best of Swinburne.

Personal life
Chase was married to Emma Service Lester.

Death and legacy
In the winter of 1936, Chase was taken ill while conducting research for The Best of Swinburne at Harvard's Widener Library. He died at the Garfield Hospital in Washington on September 24, 1937.

Chase's papers are held within the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.