C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, then part of a united Ireland under British rule. His father, Albert Lewis, was a police court solicitor, and his mother, Florence Hamilton Lewis, was a clergyman's daughter who had taken a degree in mathematics from the Royal University of Ireland ^[1]. At the age of four the boy announced that his name was Jacksie, and he answered to Jack for the rest of his life. He and his older brother Warren, always called Warnie, grew up in a house full of books and spent long wet afternoons inventing an imaginary country they named Boxen, populated by dressed animals and chivalric mice ^[2].

Florence Lewis died of cancer in August 1908, a few months before Jack's tenth birthday. The loss shattered the household. Within weeks Albert sent his son across the Irish Sea to Wynyard School in Hertfordshire, an establishment Lewis later described in his memoir Surprised by Joy as brutal and educationally worthless; its headmaster was eventually declared insane ^[1]. A string of other schools followed, including Malvern College, which Lewis disliked, before Albert made the decision that shaped his son's mind: in 1914 Jack was sent to study privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, a retired headmaster living in Great Bookham, Surrey. Kirkpatrick, nicknamed the Great Knock, drilled the teenager in logic, Greek, Latin, and rigorous argument, and Lewis credited him with teaching him to think ^[2].

During these years Lewis abandoned the Christianity of his childhood and became a convinced atheist. At the same time he was gripped by what he called Joy, a piercing longing awakened by Norse mythology, Wagner, and the landscapes of County Down. The tension between his materialist convictions and this recurring experience of longing became the central drama of his intellectual life ^[1].

Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, in 1916, but the First World War interrupted his studies almost immediately. He was commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry and arrived at the front line in France on his nineteenth birthday, November 29, 1917 ^[2]. In April 1918 he was wounded by a British shell that fell short during the Battle of Arras; the same explosion killed his sergeant. While training he had made a pact with a fellow cadet, Paddy Moore, that each would care for the other's family if one of them died. Paddy was killed, and Lewis kept the promise, sharing a home with Paddy's mother, Janie Moore, until her death in 1951, an arrangement whose exact nature biographers still debate ^[3].

Back at Oxford after the war, Lewis compiled an exceptional academic record: first-class honours in Greek and Latin literature, in ancient history and philosophy, and in English language and literature, three Firsts in all ^[1]. In 1925 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he tutored in English for nearly three decades. His first books were poetry, published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton: Spirits in Bondage in 1919 and the long narrative poem Dymer in 1926, neither of which attracted much notice ^[2].

The friendships he formed at Oxford proved decisive. Chief among them was J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow philologist and a Roman Catholic. Their long conversations about myth, language, and belief chipped away at Lewis's atheism. In 1929 he admitted, reluctantly, that God existed; in 1931, after a late-night walk with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson along Addison's Walk, he came to accept Christianity itself, an experience he recounted in Surprised by Joy ^[3].

Anyone asking who was C. S. Lewis in the 1930s would have received the answer: a formidable Oxford literary historian. His study The Allegory of Love, published in 1936, traced the medieval tradition of courtly love and allegory and won the Hawthornden Prize, establishing his scholarly reputation ^[1]. He later wrote the volume on sixteenth-century English literature (excluding drama) for the Oxford History of English Literature, a massive survey he wryly referred to by the initials OHEL, and A Preface to Paradise Lost, still cited in Milton studies ^[4].

The Second World War turned him into a public figure. Between 1941 and 1944 the BBC invited Lewis to give a series of radio talks on Christian belief, broadcast to a nation under bombardment. Delivered in plain, conversational prose, the talks reached a vast audience and were collected in 1952 as Mere Christianity, which became one of the most widely read works of Christian apologetics in the language ^[4]. In 1942 he published The Screwtape Letters, a satirical correspondence in which a senior devil advises his nephew on the corruption of a human soul. The book was a bestseller in Britain and America and put Lewis on the cover of Time magazine in 1947 ^[3].

Throughout this period Lewis met weekly with the Inklings, an informal circle of writers including Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Warnie Lewis. They gathered in Lewis's Magdalen rooms and at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford to read work in progress aloud; early drafts of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Lewis's own fiction were tested on this audience ^[3]. Lewis also wrote a science fiction trilogy, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet in 1938, and philosophical works such as The Problem of Pain (1940) and Miracles (1947).

Among the many C. S. Lewis achievements, none reached more readers than a children's story begun with a single mental picture: a faun carrying parcels through a snowy wood. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe appeared in 1950, and six further volumes followed at the rate of roughly one a year, concluding with The Last Battle in 1956, which won the Carnegie Medal, Britain's leading prize for children's literature ^[4]. The seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia have been translated into dozens of languages and have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and they remain the foundation of Lewis's popular fame ^[5].

Not everyone approved. Tolkien disliked the books' mixture of mythologies, fauns and Father Christmas and talking beavers side by side, and some critics have objected to their Christian symbolism or their handling of gender. Yet the series has never gone out of print, and film adaptations beginning in 2005 introduced Narnia to new generations ^[5].

Professional recognition at Oxford lagged behind his fame; the university twice passed him over for professorships, a slight often attributed to colleagues' distaste for his popular religious writing. Cambridge proved more welcoming. In 1954 Lewis accepted the newly created chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, commuting weekly from Oxford, where he continued to live at The Kilns, his home on the edge of the city ^[1]. His inaugural lecture, De Descriptione Temporum, famously described himself as a dinosaur, a surviving specimen of Old Western culture ^[4].

Lewis lived most of his adult life in a distinctly unconventional household at The Kilns with Janie Moore, her daughter Maureen, and his brother Warnie, who moved in after retiring from the army in 1932. Domestic life was often strained: Mrs. Moore grew demanding in her final years, and Warnie struggled with alcoholism ^[3]. Lewis's routines were otherwise those of a bachelor don: long walks, heavy correspondence answered by hand, beer and argument with friends.

That pattern broke in the 1950s. Joy Davidman Gresham, an American poet and former Communist who had converted to Christianity partly through reading Lewis's books, began corresponding with him in 1950 and moved to England with her two sons. In April 1956 Lewis married her in a civil ceremony, initially so that she could remain in Britain. When Joy was diagnosed with advanced bone cancer later that year, the relationship deepened into genuine love, and a Christian marriage ceremony was performed at her hospital bedside in March 1957 ^[6]. Her cancer went into an unexpected remission, and the couple enjoyed three years together, including a trip to Greece, before the disease returned. Joy died on July 13, 1960, at the age of forty-five ^[6].

Her death provoked the rawest book Lewis ever wrote. A Grief Observed, published in 1961 under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk, records his anger, doubt, and slow recovery with an honesty that startled readers accustomed to his confident apologetics ^[4]. His own health was failing by then. Suffering from heart and kidney disease, he resigned his Cambridge chair in the summer of 1963. C. S. Lewis died at The Kilns in Oxford on November 22, 1963, one week before his sixty-fifth birthday. News of his death was overshadowed worldwide because President John F. Kennedy was assassinated the same day; the writer Aldous Huxley also died within hours ^[5]. Lewis was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, Oxford.

Few twentieth-century authors have retained so large a readership across such different audiences. Any C. S. Lewis biography must reckon with at least three distinct legacies: the medievalist whose Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image are still assigned to students, the apologist whose Mere Christianity continues to shape popular Christian thought, and the storyteller whose Narnia books sit on children's shelves worldwide ^[1]. Estimates of his total sales run to well over 200 million copies across all titles ^[5].

Institutions have grown up around his memory. The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois holds a major collection of his letters and manuscripts along with the original wardrobe carved by his grandfather. The Kilns is preserved as a study centre, and Oxford literary tourism still traces the routes of the Inklings ^[5]. His life has itself become a subject of drama: William Nicholson's play and film Shadowlands portrays his marriage to Joy Davidman.

On November 22, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, a memorial stone to Lewis was dedicated in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, placing him alongside Chaucer, Dickens, and the other canonical figures of English letters ^[7]. Among the plainest C. S. Lewis facts is this: a writer once dismissed by some Oxford colleagues as a populariser is now read, quoted, and argued with on every continent, by children who know nothing of theology and theologians who never open the wardrobe.