C. S. Lewis

Before the wardrobes, lions, tempters and far planets, there was a book-filled house in Belfast. Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in Ulster, Ireland, before partition, the son of Albert James Lewis, a solicitor, and Florence Augusta Lewis, the daughter of a Church of Ireland priest. To family and friends he became “Jack,” a name he adopted after the death of his dog Jacksie when he was four. At seven, he moved with his family to Little Lea in East Belfast, a childhood home where books were everywhere and reading seemed, as he later put it, as easy as finding grass in a field.

Lewis’s imagination began early. He loved Beatrix Potter’s animal stories, wrote and illustrated animal tales of his own, and with his elder brother Warren, known as Warnie, created Boxen, a fantasy land run by animals. His childhood was also marked by loss. His mother died of cancer in 1908, when he was nine, and he was sent to schools in England. In those years he left the Christianity of his childhood and became an atheist, while his mind filled with European mythology, the occult, Norse legends, Greek literature, and the pull of what he later called “joy.” Private study with William T. Kirkpatrick sharpened his love of argument, reason, and classical learning, and in 1916 Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxford.

At Oxford, Lewis built the academic life that would anchor much of his work. He held a post in English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954, and later at Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1954 to 1963. He was also part of a circle that helped shape modern fantasy and Christian writing. His close friend J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, served with him on the English faculty at Oxford, and both were active in the informal literary group known as the Inklings.

Lewis returned to Anglicanism at the age of 32, influenced by Tolkien and other friends, and described himself as an ordinary layman of the Church of England. That faith strongly shaped his books and made him a widely heard voice during wartime radio broadcasts on Christianity. His nonfiction Christian apologetics include Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain. His fiction ranged from The Screwtape Letters to The Space Trilogy, but he is best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, seven books that have sold the most among his works and have been adapted for stage, television, radio, and cinema.

Lewis wrote more than 30 books, translated into more than 30 languages and read by millions. In 1956 he married the American writer Joy Davidman, who died of cancer four years later at 45. Lewis died of kidney failure on 22 November 1963, aged 64, and in 2013 he was honored with a memorial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. His words still speak because they join imagination to moral clarity, wonder to plain speech. A line like “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching” fits the spirit readers often find in him: direct, searching, and meant for real life.