C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast on November 29, 1898, and died in Oxford November 22, 1963, aged 64. His older brother Warren, known as Warnie, remained an important companion, and their shared childhood imagination produced stories about Boxen. Lewis entered Oxford University in 1917, served in the First World War, and returned to complete his studies after being wounded. He became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925, teaching English literature there until moving to Cambridge in 1954. At Cambridge, Lewis held the newly established chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College from 1954, through 1963.

His conversion from atheism to Christianity was influenced by conversations with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in 1931. He described that journey in Surprised by Joy, his 1955 autobiography, which covers childhood, schooling, and intellectual development before conversion. The series began with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950, and Lewis wrote six further installments. Its stories include Christian symbolism, while Lewis also addressed theology directly in Mere Christianity, assembled from wartime broadcasts for radio. Those broadcasts, delivered by Lewis during the Second World War, made voice familiar to British listeners before the book appeared.

In The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon advises a junior tempter, allowing Lewis to satirize temptation through correspondence between demons. Lewis’s scholarly work included The Allegory of Love, a study of medieval and Renaissance treatments of courtly love in literature. He published English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in 1954, contributing a major volume to Oxford’s literary historical series. His fiction Till We Have Faces retells the Cupid and Psyche myth through Orual, a narrator gradually confronting self deception. Lewis married Joy Davidman in 1956; A Grief Observed confronts her death from cancer in 1960 and his resulting grief.

He wrote The Problem of Pain before that loss, whereas A Grief Observed records anger, doubt, and altered faith afterward. Lewis’s children’s books remain widely read, but their publishing order differs from the internal chronology of Narnia’s imagined history itself. The Last Battle won the Carnegie Medal in 1957, one of Britain’s major annual prizes for children’s literature in Britain. Although remembered as an apologist, Lewis’s books range from literary criticism and fantasy to autobiography, sermons, and extensive personal correspondence alike. His Oxford and Cambridge careers, wartime broadcasts, Narnia, and theological writing made him a major twentieth century British Christian author.