C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis was born in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland, into a bookish Protestant household. He grew up surrounded by books — his father was a solicitor with literary tastes, and the family home had books in every room — and spent long childhood hours reading mythology, Norse legend, and the animal stories of Beatrix Potter. His mother died of cancer when he was nine, and Lewis later described this as the moment he lost his faith in a God of order and provision. He was sent to boarding school in England, experienced what he called "the worst experience of his life" in a particularly brutal institution, and eventually came under the tutelage of W. T. Kirkpatrick, a rigorous rationalist who trained him in the logical argumentation that would later serve both his literary criticism and his apologetics.

Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, interrupted by service in World War I — during which he was wounded at the Battle of Arras — and returned to complete his degree with First Class marks in both Greats and English. He remained at Oxford as a tutor in English for nearly thirty years, then moved to Cambridge in 1954 as Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English. As a scholar, his The Allegory of Love (1936) and The Discarded Image (1964) are considered among the finest works of medieval literary criticism in the twentieth century.

His reconversion to Christianity, completed around 1931 in large part through conversations with his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, opened the door to his most widely read work. The Screwtape Letters (1942) and Mere Christianity (1952) established him as the twentieth century's most effective popular Christian apologist. But it was The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) that made him immortal in the eyes of readers. The seven novels, written for children and explicitly embedding Christian allegory, work independently of their theological purpose: they are vivid, morally serious, and atmospherically rich in ways that children recognize as real even before they can articulate why.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe introduces Narnia through the back of a wardrobe, and the book's genius is in that transition — the moment when the ordinary world (a spare room, old coats, a winter smell) gives way to somewhere entirely different. Lewis believed that myth and story could carry truths that discursive argument could not reach, and he was right.

For readers today, Lewis matters both as a stylist — his prose is lucid, unhurried, and elegant without being ornate — and as a thinker about what stories are for, questions his essays continue to address with clarity and conviction that have not aged.