Winston Hewitt Collection

Winston Russell Hewitt (1922-2006) was born in Minnesota to Lilian Nyquist and John Russell Hewitt. Hewitt had one brother, John "Jack" Hewitt a doctor who was married with three children (including a nephew named Todd) to Marguerite Todd. Hewitt spent most of his childhood in Casselton, North Dakota where his father founded a hardware business. Hewitt attended North Dakota State College at sixteen, and enlisted in the Army where he was trained as a cryptographer in the Office of Strategic Services headquartered in London and Paris. After the war, Hewitt earned a B.A. in Scandinavian Studies at the Unversity of Minnesota in 1948. With the financial support of the Carnegie Institute through a scholarship, Hewitt returned to Europe to the University of Stockholm to study Scandinavian literature, developing a fluency in Swedish, with knowledge of Norwegian and Danish as well. Hewitt returned to University of Minnesota to finish his M.A. and met Mary Jane Cyrus. They married in 1953 in Paris, but divorced in 1968. Hewitt attended UCLA and earned a PhD in French in 1963. He taught French language and literature at Occidental College from 1950-1966 and at CSU Dominguez Hills from 1966-1982. While at CSUDH, Hewitt became the founding Chairman of Foreign Languages. In 1974, he received the first CSUDH Distinguished Professor Award, and that same year also published a book of literary criticism entitled "Through Those Living Pillars: Man and Nature in the Works of Emile Zola". In 1982, Hewitt retired so that he could devote all his time to his art, a passion he developed early on in his life. In 1987, Hewitt moved to Oregon, and then sometime in the early 2000s relocated again to Sedona, Arizona before succumbing to colon cancer in 2006.

Sources: Mouton Publishers file, Box 3, Folder 2; "Biography: Dr. Winston Hewitt", "The Art of Winston Hewitt" Webpage retrieved via Internet Archive:https://web.archive.org/web/20081208231219/http://winstonhewitt.org/bio/biography.cfm