C. S. Lewis
born Nov. 29, 1898, Belfast, Ire. [now in
Northern Ireland]
died Nov. 22, 1963, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.
British scholar, novelist, and author of
about 40 books, most of them on Christian
apologetics, the most widely known being The
Screwtape Letters. He also achieved fame with a
trilogy of science-fiction novels and with the
Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven
children’s books that have become classics of
fantasy literature.
During World War I, Lewis fought in France
with the Somerset Light Infantry and was wounded
in 1917. The following year he went to
University College, Oxford, where he achieved an
outstanding record as a classical scholar. From
1925 to 1954 he was a fellow and tutor of
Magdalen College, Oxford, and from 1954 to 1963
he was professor of medieval and Renaissance
English at the University of Cambridge.
Lewis lapsed into atheism in his teens but
experienced a reconversion to Christianity in
1931. His first work to attract attention was
The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology
for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933).
In 1936 came the critical and characteristic
Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition,
considered by many to be his finest scholarly
work. The first of his science fiction novels (a
genre then scarcely known), Out of the Silent
Planet (1938), was followed by the equally
remarkable fictions Perelandra (1943) and That
Hideous Strength (1945). These three books,
which form one of the best of all science
fiction trilogies, centre on an English linguist
named Ransom who voyages to Mars and Venus and
becomes involved in a cosmic struggle between
good and evil in the solar system.
Lewis’ The Problem of Pain (1940) brought him
wide recognition as a lay expositor of Christian
apologetics, but it was far exceeded by the
fictional best-selling Screwtape Letters (1942).
This satire consists of 31 letters in which an
elderly, experienced devil named Screwtape
instructs his junior, Wormwood, in the subtle
art of tempting a young Christian convert.
Lewis’ first story for children was The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950; filmed 2005),
the first of seven tales about the kingdom of
Narnia. The Narnia books are exciting, often
humorous, inventive, and, in the final scenes of
The Last Battle (1956), deeply moving. Notable
among Lewis’ other books are a volume of
autobiography, Surprised by Joy; The Shape of My
Early Life (1955), and a novel based on the
story of Psyche and Cupid, Till We Have Faces: A
Myth Retold (1956).
