SOURCE CITATION
"C(live) S(taples) Lewis." Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, 2nd ed., 8 vols. Gale Group, 2002. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
Photograph by Hulton Deutsch Collection/John Chillingwo and provided by HarperCollins.

BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
As a sworn bachelor and respected lecturer in medieval and Renaissance studies at Oxford University, C. S. Lewis was an unlikely candidate for the inventor of one of the most popular series of children's books written in the twentieth century. However, as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis became so well known as a children's writer that in some circles his accomplishments as literary critic, religious apologist, poet, and science fiction novelist were nearly forgotten.

Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, to a solicitor and a clergyman's daughter. His father, Albert Lewis, was of Welsh origin, and his mother, Flora Hamilton, was "a brilliant mathematician of an old Irish family," wrote David L. Russell in Dictionary of Literary Biography. He was preceded by an elder brother, Warren. The Lewises were well-educated and prosperous, and the mother's serene temperament balanced his father's moody disposition. The family's happiness was relatively short-lived, however; Lewis's mother contracted cancer when he was nine years old and slowly died at home. Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Live: "With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security."

Lewis attributed much of his imaginative development to the identification of a sensation he called "Joy." His first encounter with it was brought on by a toy garden his brother built on the top of a biscuit tin. When he saw the garden, as he wrote in Surprised by Joy: "It made me aware of nature--not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. . . . As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden." When he was six, his father moved his family to the "new house," a larger home in the country. It was here that Lewis first remembered the toy garden and how he had felt about it: "It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden . . . comes somewhere near it," he recorded in Surprised by Joy.

After his mother's death, Lewis and Warren drifted from their father, who became emotionally distant. As was common for middle-to upper-class children of the early twentieth century, both boys were sent to boarding schools. Lewis's early experiences with these institutions were unpleasant at best. His first teacher, who regularly beat his students, lost his school due to his cruelty and poor financial practices, so Lewis was moved to another school, which he also did not like. At boarding school, Lewis abandoned his childhood belief in God. Eventually, his father hired a former school headmaster, W. T. Kirkpatrick, to tutor Lewis and prepare the boy for college. With Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis called "Kirk," he lived a "perfect" life, focusing on studying and writing, interrupted only by meals and daily walks.

Lewis first saw Oxford University in 1916, when he arrived as a scholarship candidate. He was taken by it and wrote his father, as is recorded in Letters of C. S. Lewis, "This place has surpassed my wildest dreams; I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty nights." His academic studies were interrupted by World War I, and in 1917 he was stationed in France. After being wounded and returning to England to recuperate, Lewis resumed his studies and prepared for an academic career, convinced that it was the only one in which he could be successful. In 1925 he was elected to a five-year teaching fellowship at Magdalene College and asked to teach philosophy as well as English. A letter he wrote to his father at the time, also collected in Letters of C. S. Lewis, read, "I need hardly say that I would have coached a troupe of performing bagbirds in the quadrangle."

In 1929, while working on The Allegory of Love, Lewis began his famous conversion to Christianity. "Lewis had been an atheist during much of his late youth and early adulthood, perhaps largely because it was the fashionable stance for a young intellectual to take," Russell observed. However, "Lewis was always to see the year 1929 as the turning point of his life, for that was when he began moving away from atheism toward Christianity." It was on a bus trip during the summer of 1929 that Lewis "went through a mystical experience," Russell wrote. During this epiphany, "he viewed himself as if encased in a constraining suit of armor that he must remove." His brother wrote in the preface to Letters of C. S. Lewis that "this seemed to me no sudden plunge into a new life, but rather a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing--an illness that had its origins in our childhood, in the dry husks of religion offered by the semi-political church-going of Ulster, in the similar dull emptiness of compulsory church during our schooldays." In the autumn of 1929, Lewis's father died, an event which may have contributed to his transformation from non-believer to devout Christian, Russell wrote.

During these years, Lewis also began forming the relationships that would mark his life. One of the most puzzling of these was his tie to Mrs. Moore, the mother of a companion who had died during World War I. She was 28 years his senior, "an unschooled woman with a penchant for psychosomatic illnesses, making her a rather surprising companion for someone of Lewis's intellect," Russell said. Although the two seemed incompatible, "Lewis was the surrogate son, in the very least, and quite likely Moore replaced Lewis's own dead mother," Russell remarked. Their relationship endured until her death in 1951, with Lewis often shouldering a great many of the household chores despite his many other responsibilities. "Moore quite likely provided Lewis with a measure of emotional and domestic stability that he welcomed as an escape from the daily rigors of academe," Russell said.

The life of a teacher and scholar at prestigious Oxford occupied Lewis during the 1930s. "As a teacher Lewis generally earned the respect, and sometimes the admiration, of his students," Russell wrote. "He was demanding, but occasionally abrasive and insensitive; some of his pupils had the distinct feeling that their sessions with him were simply annoying interruptions in his day." Other of Lewis's students "found him extremely conscientious, astonishingly well-read, astute in judgment, and generous in character," Russell said. "His lectures were popular, both for their lively delivery and their rich content, for he drew from the great breadth of his voracious reading."

Many of the strong friendships Lewis forged in the 1930s and 1940s were with other Christians; among them were J. R. R. Tolkien, metaphysical writer Charles Williams, and others who formed a group called the Inklings. Members and visitors would read from their writings, which would be vigorously praised or criticized by the group. Lewis described the Inklings in a letter collected in Letters of C. S. Lewis: "We meet on Friday evenings in my rooms, theoretically to talk about literature, but in fact nearly always to talk about something better. What I owe to them all is incalculable. Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my conversion."

In 1939, England entered World War II. During the war, Lewis and his brother took in some London children seeking refuge from the bombings. At about the same time he wrote The Screwtape Letters, a series of notes from a senior devil to a junior tempter. The book was very popular and was Lewis's first "Christian" success. At the time, he also became known for his radio broadcasts aimed at explaining theology to laymen.

During the 1950s, Lewis embarked on The Chronicles of Narnia, the stories of a fairy-tale land and the eight children who visit it. Lewis's religious ideas and philosophy were profoundly shaken after he was soundly defeated in a debate by Christian philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, Russell wrote. After reevaluating his own position as a writer and the methods available to him to transmit his religious ideas, "he struck upon the idea of using children's fantasy as a vehicle for his religious message," Russell said. "Given Lewis's firm grounding in medieval romance, it is not surprising that he should choose heroic fantasy as the medium for his allegory."

Lewis felt that his "imaginative self" was behind the series' creation and represented more of his personality than his work in either apologetics or criticism. Despite the series' popularity with children, some critics and parents disapproved of the amounts of violence contained in the books. Lewis wrote an admirer in 1951, "A number of mothers, and still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children."

The books portray the rich history of the realm of Narnia, a magical land populated by noble kings, talking animals, evil witches, and magic of all types. The books are "heavily imbued with medieval romance elements and rich in Christian allegory and symbolism," Russell said. For example, Aslan, the great lion who created Narnia through a song, is "a thinly disguised Christ figure," complete with a sacrificial-death-and-resurrection story. "Taken as a whole," Russell wrote, the Narnia books "relate the history of a land, describing its heroes, its villains, its triumphs, its defeats."

In 1953, Lewis met Joy Davidman, a woman with whom he had corresponded and who had become a Christian through his influence. The pair became good friends and fell in love, but in 1956 Joy discovered she had cancer. Doctors gave her only a few weeks to live, but the pair married despite her medical condition. Rather than a few weeks, Joy lived until 1960. Lewis and his wife enjoyed a happy union, and he did not live long after her death; he died on November 23, 1963, one week before his sixty-forth birthday, on the same day as the deaths of Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy. Rather than fading with time, C. S. Lewis's writings have survived early criticisms to become increasingly popular with children and adults alike.

UPDATES
September 9, 2003: Lewis's book The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was named "the book parents most want to share with their own youngsters" according to a poll by BBC Parenting magazine. Source: Ananova, www.ananova.com, September 9, 2003.

December 23, 2003: Lewis's novel The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe will be filmed in 2004 by Andrew Adamson. The film is scheduled for release in 2005. Source: Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com, December 23, 2003.

December 9, 2005: Lewis's book The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was adapted for a film directed by Andrew Adamson. The film was released by Walt Disney Pictures on December 9, 2005. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, December 9, 2005.

February 2, 2006: Production has begun on a film version of Lewis's Prince Caspian, produced by Disney and Walden Media. Source: USA Today, February 2, 2006.

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Born November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland; died November 22, 1963, in Oxford, England, of heart failure after an extended illness; son of Albert James (a solicitor) and Flora Augusta (Hamilton) Lewis; married Joy Davidman Gresham (a poet and novelist), 1956 (died, 1960); stepchildren: David Gresham, Douglas Gresham. Avocation: Walking. Education: Attended Malvern College, 1913-14; University College, Oxford, A.B. (classics; first class honors), 1922, A.B. (English; first class honors), 1923. Memberships: British Academy (fellow), Royal Society of Literature (fellow), Athenaeum, Sir Walter Scott Society (president, 1956), Socratic Club (president and speaker), British Academy (fellow).

CAREER
University College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, philosophy tutor and lecturer, 1924; Magdalen College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, fellow and tutor in English literature, 1925-54; Magdalene College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, professor of medieval and Renaissance English, 1954-63. Ballard Matthews Lecturer, University of Wales, 1941; Riddell Lecturer, University of Durham, 1942; Clark Lecturer, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1944. Military service: British Army, Somerset Light Infantry, 1918-19; became second lieutenant.