C. S. Lewis
(1898-1963)
Clive Staples Lewis' photo taken from
Into the Wardrobe: The C. S. Lewis Web Site
Quick
Overview
LifeLinksWork
Literary Work
The Problem of Pain (1940)
Fiction
1.The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2.Prince Caspian
3.The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader"
4.The Silver Chair
5.The Horse and His Boy
6.The Magician's Nephew
7.The Last Battle .
Also while it is not his work the play Shadowlands
by Nicholson
is a wonderful depiction of Lewis' relationship with his wife Joy.
Much of the material found in the play can also be found in Lewis' work
A Grief Observed.
Links(just
a few that are available)
Christian
Resources on the Internet (1 of 55) 77%
[find
similar]
html (Christian Web Sites) compiled by David Henderson. Some of the
best WWW sites for up-to-date info on new resources in this subject area.
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/christian-resources.html
Into the Wardrobe: The C.S. Lewis
Web Site
Information "designed for you to learn and study about the life and
writings of C. S. Lewis, noted author of Christian apologetics and other
writings." Includes biographical sketches, bibliographies of his work,
a library of papers on Lewis contributed by readers, and an archive of
photographs and sound recordings.
Life
During World War I, Lewis fought in France with the Somerset Light Infantry and was wounded in 1917. The following year he went to University College, Oxford, where he achieved an outstanding record as a classical scholar. From 1925 to 1954 he was a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, and from 1954 to 1963 he was professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge.
Lewis lapsed into atheism in his teens but experienced a reconversion
to Christianity in 1931. His first work to attract attention was The Pilgrim's
Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism
(1933). In 1936 came the critical and characteristic Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, considered by many to be his finest
scholarly work. The first of his science fiction
novels (a genre then scarcely
known), Out of the Silent Planet (1938), was followed by the equally remarkable
fictions Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). These three
books, which form one of the best of all science fiction trilogies, centre
on an English linguist named Ransom who voyages to Mars and Venus and becomes
involved in a cosmic struggle between good and evil in the solar system.
Lewis' The Problem of Pain (1940) brought him wide recognition as a lay expositor of Christian apologetics, but it was far exceeded by the fictional best-selling Screwtape Letters (1942). This satire consists of 31 letters in which an elderly, experienced devil named Screwtape instructs his junior, Wormwood, in the subtle art of tempting a young Christian convert. Lewis' first story for children was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the first of seven tales about the kingdom of Narnia.
The Narnia books are exciting, often humorous, inventive, and, in the final scenes of The Last Battle (1956), deeply moving. Notable among Lewis' other books are a volume of autobiography, Surprised by Joy; The Shape of My Early Life (1955), and a novel based on the story of Psyche and Cupid, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956).
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
W.H. Lewis (ed.), Letters (1966), compiled by C.S. Lewis' brother, includes a memoir.
Dabney Adams Hart, Through the Open Door (1984); and A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis (1990), are biographies.
Critical studies include Chad Walsh, The Literary Legacy of C.S.
Lewis (1979); and Margaret Patterson Hannay, C.S. Lewis (1981).
Copyright © 1994-1997 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
"Lewis, C.S." Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/347/11.html> 
[Accessed 22 January 1998].
Illustration by Dr. Kyong Kim of Mount Vernon Nazarene University.