John Frederick Norman Lewis (28 June 1908 – 22 July 2003) was a British writer. While he is best known for his travel writing, he also wrote twelve novels and several volumes of autobiography. Subjects he explored in his travel writing include life in Naples during the Allied liberation of Italy (Naples '44); Vietnam and French colonial Indochina (A Dragon Apparent); Indonesia (An Empire of the East); Burma (Golden Earth); tribal peoples of India (A Goddess in the Stones); Sicily and the Mafia (The Honoured Society and In Sicily); and the destruction caused by Christian missionaries in Latin America and elsewhere (The Missionaries). His newspaper article entitled "Genocide in Brazil" (1969) prompted the creation of Survival International—an organisation dedicated to the protection of indigenous peoples around the world. Graham Greene described Lewis as "one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century". Early life Lewis came from a Welsh family and in later life identified – at least partially – as Welsh, but he was born at "Clifton" (which Lewis called a "quiet, rather dismal little house"), 343, Carterhatch Lane, Enfield, Middlesex, a suburb of London, to pharmacist Richard George Lewis (d. 1936) and his wife Louise Charlotte (née Evans; d. 1950). His parents became spiritualists after the deaths of Lewis's elder brothers, and hoped young Lewis would grow up to become a medium. A clever child, Lewis was bullied by other children, and sent by his parents to live for a couple of years with three deeply religious "half-mad aunts" in Wales. Having been educated at Enfield Grammar School, as a young man, Lewis tried a variety of ways to make a living in the Great Depression of the 1930s, including self-employed wedding photographer, auctioneer, umbrella wholesaler and briefly a motorcycle racer at Harringay Stadium and White City. At this time of his life, he was a "young rake and dandy" with a "love of fast cars and adventure". For some years during this period, he set up home in Woodberry Down near Manor House in London. Lewis's different books give varying accounts of his British Army service in World War II. In his autobiography, Jackdaw Cake, he says he served in the Intelligence Corps in Algiers, Tunisia and Naples in 1942-44; elsewhere says he was eventually commissioned as a second lieutenant and served with the 1st King's Dragoon Guards, an armoured regiment in