C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis was born and raised in Ireland. His father was a Welsh solicitor and his mother was the daughter of an Anglican priest—Lewis’s early exposure to Christianity would influence his writing and thinking for the rest of his life. Growing up, Lewis was fascinated by mythology, particularly that of Scandinavia, Greece, and Ireland. He excelled at Latin and Greek in school and won a prestigious scholarship to Oxford University. Lewis fought in World War I while still an undergraduate, a traumatic experience that made him an atheist throughout his twenties. He ultimately graduated from Oxford with a “triple first” in English, Classics, and Philosophy, an extremely prestigious achievement both then and now. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Lewis worked as a professor at Oxford’s Magdalen College, teaching English literature. Although Lewis was an atheist for many years, in his early thirties he converted to the Anglican Church, based on his studies of classical Christian texts and his friendship with such Christian thinkers as George Macdonald and J.R.R. Tolkien. He was at first an unwilling convert, but felt that he could see no other truth. For the remainder of his life, Lewis was a vocal proponent of Christian values, authoring Christian texts such as Mere Christianity, a series of short lectures on Christian values and the existence of God. During World War II, Lewis sheltered London children in his house in the English countryside, which forms the premise of his most famous book, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (1949). Lewis authored six more books in his Chronicles of Narnia series and also wrote the popular Space Trilogy (1938-1945). Although his fiction made Lewis wealthy, in his later years, he also taught medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University. He married the American writer Joy Davidman in 1956 so that she could live in England, and Davidman served as inspiration for the character of Orual in Till We Have Faces. Lewis died on the same day as the author Aldous Huxley, which was also the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The Chronicles of Narnia, along with Lewis’s writings on Christianity, remain enormously popular more than half a century after his death.