C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis was a British novelist, theologian, and literary critic whose Narnia chronicles and works of Christian apologetics have made him one of the most widely read authors of the twentieth century.

C.S. Lewis spent most of his professional life as a Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, and later as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. He was a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and a central member of the Inklings, the informal Oxford literary group that shaped some of the twentieth century’s most enduring fantasy literature. Lewis’s intellectual range was extraordinary: he wrote works of literary scholarship, Christian apologetics, science fiction, allegory, and children’s fantasy — and did each of them well enough to be remembered for it.

The Chronicles of Narnia, seven novels published between 1950 and 1956, are the books for which Lewis is most widely loved. They are ostensibly children’s fantasies about a magical world entered through a wardrobe, but they are also theological arguments, moral fables, and meditations on faith, death, and the nature of reality. Lewis never talked down to children, and the Narnia books reward adult re-reading as generously as any novel written for grown-ups: the later books especially — The Silver Chair, The Magician’s Nephew, The Last Battle — carry a weight of theological seriousness that sits alongside the adventure without diminishing it.

The Screwtape Letters (1942) is a different kind of achievement: a work of Christian apologetics in the form of a satirical novel, in which a senior demon advises his nephew on the techniques of spiritual corruption. The formal inversion — vice presented from the perspective of vice — gives Lewis a freedom that no straightforward argument could provide. It is one of the cleverest books of the twentieth century, and one of the most unsettling. Lewis converted to Christianity in his early thirties and never wrote about it drily: his faith was hard-won and hard-held, and it shows in everything he wrote.