Louis Kermit Sheets was a pacifist artist, printer, actor, director, and stage designer who contributed greatly to the early development of the San Francisco Renaissance in the late 1940s. He was born in California's Imperial Valley on August 14, 1915, grew up in Fresno, and graduated from Chapman College in 1936. Between January 1942 and January 1946 he served as a conscientious objector in CPS camp 21 (Cascade Locks at Wyeth on the Columbia River) and camp 56 (Waldport on the Oregon Coast). At Wyeth he co-edited The Illiterati journal and the camp newsletter The Columbian, and wrote and performed in the satirical play Mikado in CPS . At Waldport he and his co-editor Kemper Nomland joined William Everson's Fine Arts Group, where he was closely involved in the printing of the Untide Press and was a key member of the high quality theater group in the camp.
Many of the camp theater personnel settled in San Francisco in 1946, founding the Interplayers in association with Adrian Wilson, Joyce Lancaster Wilson and other colleagues from the Waldport camp. At the same time, in collaboration with poet James Broughton, he founded the Centaur Press, publishing poetry and drama by Broughton, Anais Nin, Robert Duncan, Glen Coffield, Madeline Gleason, and Muriel Rukeyser. In the early 1950s he acted in Broughton's films The Pleasure Garden (winner of a Cannes Festival Award) and Loony Tom the Happy Lover . Returning from Europe in 1955, he became managing director of The Playhouse, until the early 1960s, mounting many successful productions, including Helen Adam’s long-running San Francisco’s Burning (December 1961- June 1962) with music by Warner Jepson. In 1965 he married Jane Steckle, who died in 1999. From 1970 to 1980 he was director of the Center at the Lighthouse for the Blind. After retirement he spent much of the 1980s in writing novels and short stories and traveling with Jane. He died on April 6, 2006 in San Francisco.
The collection has been assembled with generous assistance from Norma Miller, and early participant as actor and director in the Interplayers and Playhouse companies, and a lifelong friend of Kermit Sheets.
From the guide to the Kermit Sheets Collection, 1915-1994, (Lewis & Clark College Special Collections and Archives)
