James Lewicki: He made American Folklore Creepy

James Lewicki (1917-1979) illustrated many magazine covers and books for LIFE and others, mostly in the 50’s and 60’s.  I encountered him as a small child reading the The Life Treasury Of American Folklore (1961).  The Treasury stemmed from a series in LIFE Magazine, “The Folklore of America”, conceived and illustrated by Lewicki, which appeared in 1959-1960.

From the first full-page illustration of the “Sea of Darkness”, with gigantic sea monsters and blood-red waves, I was hooked.

The Sea of Darkness

 Some of the other illustrations were nice too…

A well-endowed mermaid lures Pascagoula Indians away from Jesus

 

…but I was fascinated by the lurid, scary images Lewicki produced.  Many of the people (and animals) seemed to be crazed and bloodthirsty, with staring eyes and overly-red mouths.  Even many of the illustrations for non-spooky tales were themselves spooky. 

The (Zombie?) Angel of Hadley

The images burned into my brain, and for a while there were some pages I had to skip past, but I kept going back to the Treasury again and again.  I recently flipped through the book 20-some years later, and there they were.  They’d been lurking there all those years…   

Bras Coupé

  

Sedna's amputated fingers become marine mammals

Ghost Pirates of Manhattan

  

Loup-Garou Attack!

The one illustration that really gave me the willies was the witch woman on pages 172-173, spinning off her skin.  Good story, too:  “As he watched, she spun her entire skin off her body as easy as the shucks off an ear of corn.  When it was all off, she was revealed as an enormous, tawny-yellow cat.  She took the skin and chucked it under the bed.  “Lay there, skin,” she told it, “with that fool husband of mine snoring in the bed until I come back.  I’m goin to have me some fun.””

The Witch Woman

Someone else, probably scarred for life by these images like me, even went about creating a life-size model of the witch woman.

The Treasury itself has a wide range of stories from 1492 to World War II, including a number of unusual ones.  But, needless to say, the illustrations were the most memorable part for me.