C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963) was a British writer, literary scholar and lay theologian who taught medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge. [1] He is best remembered for The Chronicles of Narnia, a seven-volume children's fantasy sequence, and for apologetic works including The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. [2] His scholarly study The Allegory of Love remains a landmark in the criticism of medieval literature.
Early life and education
Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898. His mother died of cancer when he was nine, and he was sent to a succession of English boarding schools, including Wynyard School, Campbell College and Malvern College, before being tutored privately by W. T. Kirkpatrick, whose rigorous logic he later credited with shaping his habits of argument. [1]
He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, but his studies were interrupted by the First World War. Commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry, he served on the Western Front and was wounded at the Battle of Arras in 1918. [2] Returning to Oxford, he took first-class honours in classics, philosophy and English.
Academic career
Lewis was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925 and taught there for nearly thirty years. In 1936 he published The Allegory of Love, a study of courtly love and allegorical narrative from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, which won the Sir Israel Gollancz Prize and established him as a major scholar. [1] Later academic works included A Preface to Paradise Lost and a volume on sixteenth-century English literature for the Oxford History of English Literature.
At Oxford he belonged to the Inklings, an informal literary circle whose members included J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Lewis's brother Warren. In 1954 he accepted the newly created chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he held a fellowship at Magdalene College until shortly before his death. [1]
Christian writing
Raised in the Church of Ireland, Lewis became an atheist in adolescence and returned to Christianity in his early thirties, partly through conversations with Tolkien and other friends; he described the process in the autobiographical Surprised by Joy. [2] He went on to write extensively for a general readership on belief, suffering and moral philosophy.
The Problem of Pain appeared in 1940 and The Screwtape Letters, a satire cast as correspondence between two devils, in 1942. During the Second World War he gave a series of radio talks for the BBC that were later collected as Mere Christianity, one of the most widely read works of twentieth-century apologetics. [3] He also wrote the science-fiction Space Trilogy, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet.
Narnia and later life
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950, followed by six further Narnia books completed in 1956; the final volume, The Last Battle, received the Carnegie Medal. [1] The series has sold in the tens of millions of copies and been adapted for radio, television, stage and film.
In 1956 Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman, initially in a civil ceremony to secure her residence in Britain; she died of cancer in 1960, and his response was recorded in A Grief Observed. [2] Lewis died at his home in Oxford on 22 November 1963. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and received honorary doctorates from several European universities, and in 2013 a memorial to him was dedicated in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. [3]
