Lewis Spratlan (1940 - 2023) was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music who won a Pulitzer Prize for the opera Life Is a Dream 22 years after he completed the work. He was destined to a performing career as an oboist when he applied to a graduate program to be a composer and taught music while he wrote. Spratlan joined the faculty of Amherst College in 1970, and later held the Peter R. Pouncey chair in music. After retiring in 2006, he held the title of Peter R. Pouncey Professor of Music, Emeritus, at Amherst. He also conducted the Amherst College Orchestra for several years. He said he found profoundly important and kept at teaching for 36 years.
Spratlan began composing what would become his most honored piece of music in 1975 when the New Haven Opera Theater commissioned Life Is a Dream. But the company went out of business before he finished it in 1978. Spratlan finally raised enough money to fund two performances of its second act in January 2000, then submitted the piece to the Pulitzer committee. A few months later, he discovered that he had won on the afternoon of April, 10, 2000, while in a meeting with a student at Amherst College. Despite his enthusiasm for the work, he was caught off-guard by its delayed success. Even after the opera was honored with the Pulitzer, a decade passed until all three acts of Life Is a Dream were performed in their entirety by the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico in 2010. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored Spratlan with the Charles Ives Opera Prize for Life Is a Dream.
