Joan Lewisohn Crowell, poet, author, composer, and activist, died on Saturday, April 18, at her home in Quogue, surrounded by her children. She was 93.
She was the wife of David G. Crowell, who predeceased her six years ago, and the former wife of Sidney Simon, the artist who co-founded the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture while they were married.
She was born in New York, the daughter of Sam A. Lewisohn and Margaret Seligman Lewisohn. Her parents’ marriage joined two members of New York’s “great Jewish families.” A photo of Ms. Crowell and her sisters is on the cover of Stephen Birmingham’s “Our Crowd.”
In the 1960s Ms. Crowell, writing as Joan Simon, published two books. One was a novel, “Portrait of a Father” (Athenaeum, 1960). The other, “Fort Dix Stockade,” was a non-fiction accounting of the mistreatment of Vietnam War activists. She also wrote an English language libretto for Gluck’s “Orpheus” and numerous poems published in various journals. Several decades later she wrote both the music and librettos of operas including “The Bell Witch of Tennessee” and “The Heights,” which were performed in concert format. She also wrote a variety of other music, some of which was recorded. Her recent poems were published as “Poems of Possibilities” (Sheep Meadow Press, 2008) and “Recent Poems” (Lulu Press, 2012).
Ms. Crowell helped found the Rockland Country Day School in Congress in 1959 and continued later to support non-violent action. She raised funds for Thich Nat Han, the Vietnamese monk, and for Danielo Dolci, known as the “Gandhi of Sicily.” She also aided arts organizations such as the theater Cafe La Mama. She was a young woman of amusing contradictions, survivors said. Though she told her parents she didn’t want to go to college, she got her bachelor’s degree from Bennington, where she studied with Francis Fergusson, and earned a master’s degree in English from New York University, where she also taught in the 1940s. Having gone to New York’s progressive Lincoln School, where children had a say in what they studied, Ms. Crowell claimed to have gone no further in math than fractions. Despite that, she was the business manager of the Partisan Review in the 1940s and the treasurer of the author’s union PEN in the 1970s. In later years she did all her composing on computers, to the astonishment of her children.
Those ironies continued throughout her life; despite often claiming that she was a “loner,” she had five children, 16 grandchildren and step-grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
She is survived by a son, architect Mark Simon and wife Penny Bellamy of Connecticut; and daughters, artist Teru Simon of Vermont, designer-manufacturer Rachel Simon and husband Philippe Labeau of Red Hook, artist Nora Simon of Boston, and nonprofit executive Juno Duenas and husband Robert in San Francisco, along with their numerous progeny.
A memorial gathering is being planned for family and friends in New York City in September.
Memorial donations may be made to Support for Families, www.supportforfamilies.org, or East End Hospice, www.eeh.org.
on Jun 8, 2015