Sunday 21st March 2010

Gallery of  Influential Lives #7 – CS Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His mother died when he was ten years old and Lewis retreated into the world of books, both reading and writing. He was an excellent scholar. In 1916 Lewis won a scholarship to Oxford University but soon enlisted in the British army as an officer and in 1917 he was sent to the front line in the Somme valley in France.

Five months later Lewis was wounded. It took him six months to recover and returned to duty in England but was soon discharged from the army. Lewis returned to Oxford and over the next four months he earned Firsts in Greek and Latin literature, Philosophy and English. In 1925 Lewis became a Fellow of Magdalen college, Oxford where he was an English language and literature tutor until 1954 when he went to Cambridge University.

Lewis became a Christian in 1931 and much of his subsequent writings were Christian or Christian related.

In 1952 Lewis met Joy Gresham and four years later he married her but she was thought to be terminally ill with cancer at the time and she was also threatened with deportation (she was not a British citizen). Joy did recover but four years later the cancer returned and she died. Lewis wrote an account of his feelings of Joy's death entitled 'A Grief Observed'.

Lewis died in 1963, one week before his sixty fifth birthday. He had been suffering from a variety of illnesses.

His books and writings included:

• The Pilgrim's Regress : An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism
• The Eagle and Child
• 16th Century English Literature for the Oxford History of English Literature series
• The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition
• The Space Trilogy
• Screwtape Letters - a series published in a newspaper and broadcast over BBC radio
• The Great Divorce
• Miracles: A Preliminary Study
• The Seven books in the series Chronicles of Narnia
  • The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
  • Prince Caspian
  • The Voyage of the 'Dawn Trader'
  • The Silver Chair
  • The Horse and His Boy
  • The Magician's Nephew
  • The Last Battle
• His biography - Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
• Reflections on the Psalms
• Studies in Words
• The Four Loves
• A Grief Observed
• An Experiment in Criticism
• They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses