Name:	C. S. Lewis
Birth:	November 29 1898
Death:	November 22 1963
Nationality:	IE
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Biography

Clive Staples Lewis, commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends as Jack, was a Northern Irish academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. He is also known for his fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.

Lewis was a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. Both authors were leading figures in the English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group known as the "Inklings". According to his memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis had been baptised in the Church of Ireland at birth, but fell away from his faith during his adolescence. Owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at about the age of 30, Lewis re-converted to Christianity, becoming "a very ordinary layman of the Church of England". His conversion had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. Later in his life he married the American writer Joy Gresham, who died of bone cancer four years later at the age of 45.

Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies over the years. The books that comprise The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularised on stage, in TV, in radio, and in cinema.

Lewis continues to attract a wide readership. Readers of his fiction are often unaware of what Lewis considered the Christian themes of his works. His Christian apologetics are read and quoted by followers of a wide range of religious denominations, including Catholics and Mormons.

Lewis has been the subject of several biographies, a few of which were written by some of his close friends, such as Roger Lancelyn Green and George Sayer. In 1985 the screenplay Shadowlands by William Nicholson, dramatizing Lewis's life and relationship with Joy Davidman Gresham, was aired on British TV (starring Joss Ackland as Lewis and Claire Bloom as Joy). In 1989 this was staged as a theatre play (starring Nigel Hawthorne) and in 1993 Shadowlands became a feature film, starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy. In 2005, a one hour made for TV movie entitled C. S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia (starring Anton Rodgers) provided a general synopsis of Lewis's life.

Many books have been inspired by Lewis, including A Severe Mercy by his correspondent and friend Sheldon Vanauken. The Chronicles of Narnia have been particularly influential. Modern children's literature such as Daniel Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter have been more or less influenced by Lewis' series (Hilliard 2005). Pullman, an atheist and so fierce a critic of Lewis' work as to be dubbed "the anti-Lewis", considers him a negative influence and has accused Lewis of featuring religious propaganda, misogyny, racism, and emotional sadism (BBC News 2005) in his books. Authors of adult fantasy literature such as Tim Powers have also testified to being influenced by Lewis' work.

Most of Lewis’ posthumous work has been edited by his literary executor, Walter Hooper. An independent Lewis scholar, the late Kathryn Lindskoog, argued that Hooper's scholarship is not reliable and that he has made false statements and attributed forged works to Lewis. C. S. Lewis' stepson, Douglas Gresham, denies the forgery claims, saying that "The whole controversy thing was engineered for very personal reasons... Her fanciful theories have been pretty thoroughly discredited."

Lewis was strongly opposed to the creation of live-action versions of his works. His major concern was that the anthropomorphic animal characters "when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare". This was said in the context of the 1950s, when technology would not allow the special effects required to make a coherent, robust film version of Narnia.

The song "The Earth Will Shake" performed by Thrice is based on one of his poems, and the band Sixpence None the Richer are named after a passage in Mere Christianity. The Great Divorce has served as the inspiration for at least three pieces of music: a string quartet piece entitled The Great Divorce by Matt Slocum of Sixpence None the Richer, the song "The High Countries" by Caedmon's Call on their album Back Home, and Phil Woodward's 2007 rock album Ghosts and Spirits. New Zealand Christian singer-songwriter Brooke Fraser also included a song entitled "C. S. Lewis Song" in her latest album "Albertine" which contains passages from his writing. Christian alternative rock band Poor Old Lu are so named because of a sentence in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Another alternative rock band, Future of Forestry, got its name from Lewis's poem The Future of Forestry. 2nd Chapter of Acts recorded an album entitled The Roar of Love, inspired by the first of the Narnia stories. British band The Waterboys quoted from the final Narnia book, The Last Battle, in their 1984 song "Church Not Made with Hands". Later, on their 1990 album Room to Roam, The Waterboys included a song entitled "Further Up, Further In", the title taken from the penultimate chapter of The Last Battle. Also, Joni Mitchell included a song titled "The Dawntreader" on her album, "Song to a Seagull."

The 2005 film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was based on his first installment in the Narnia series. Film adaptations have been made of two other books he wrote: Prince Caspian (released on 16 May 2008) and Voyage of the Dawn Treader (to be released on 7 May 2010).

Several C. S. Lewis Societies exist around the world, including one which was founded in Oxford in 1982 to discuss papers on the life and works of Lewis and the other Inklings, and generally appreciate all things Lewisian. His name is also used by a variety of Christian organizations, often with a concern for maintaining conservative Christian values in education or literary studies.

Career

THE SCHOLAR

Lewis began his brilliant academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford, where he won a triple first, the highest honors in three areas of study. Lewis then taught as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years, from 1925 to 1954, and later was the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Using this position, he argued that there was no such thing as an English Renaissance. Much of his scholarly work concentrated on the later Middle Ages, especially its use of allegory. His The Allegory of Love (1936) helped reinvigorate the serious study of late medieval narratives like the Roman de la Rose. Lewis wrote several prefaces to old works of literature and poetry, like Layamon's Brut. His book "A Preface to Paradise Lost" is still one of the most valuable criticisms of that work. His last academic work, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964), is a summary of the medieval world view, the "discarded image" of the cosmos in his title.

Lewis was a prolific writer, and his circle of literary friends became an informal discussion society known as the "Inklings", including J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and his brother Warnie Lewis. At Oxford he was the tutor of, among many other undergraduates, poet John Betjeman, critic Kenneth Tynan, mystic Bede Griffiths, and Sufi scholar Martin Lings. Curiously, the religious and conservative Betjeman detested Lewis, whereas the anti-Establishment Tynan retained a life-long admiration for him.

Of Tolkien, Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy:

When I began teaching for the English Faculty, I made two other friends, both Christians (these queer people seemed now to pop up on every side) who were later to give me much help in getting over the last stile. They were H.V.V. Dyson … and J.R.R. Tolkien. Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.

THE AUTHOR

The Pilgrim's Regress

His first novel after becoming a Christian was The Pilgrim's Regress, his take on John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress which depicted his own experience with Christianity. The book was critically panned at the time.

In a footnote of the biography D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith 1939 – 1981 by Iain Murray, Murray notes the following: "Lewis is said to have valued ML-J's appreciation and encouragement when the early edition of his Pilgrim's Regress was not selling well. Vincent Lloyd-Jones and Lewis knew each other well, being contemporaries at Oxford. ML-J met the author again and they had a long conversation when they found both themselves on the same boat to Ireland in 1953. On the later occasion, to the question, 'When are you going to write another book?', Lewis replied, 'When I understand the meaning of prayer.'"

Space Trilogy

His Space Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy novels (also called the Cosmic Trilogy) dealt with what Lewis saw as the then-current dehumanizing trends in modern science fiction. The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, was apparently written following a conversation with his friend J. R. R. Tolkien about these trends; Lewis agreed to write a "space travel" story and Tolkien a "time travel" one. Tolkien’s story, "The Lost Road", a tale connecting his Middle-earth mythology and the modern world, was never completed. Lewis’s main character of Ransom is based in part on Tolkien, a fact that Tolkien himself alludes to in his Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. The second novel, Perelandra, illustrates a new Garden of Eden, a new Adam and Eve, and a new "serpent figure" to tempt them. The story can be seen as a hypothesis of what could have happened if "our Eve" had resisted more firmly the temptation of the serpent. The last novel in the Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, also contains numerous references to Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth. Many of the ideas presented in the books, particularly in That Hideous Strength, are dramatizations of arguments made more formally in Lewis’ The Abolition of Man.

This last was based on the series of lectures Lewis had given at Durham University in 1943, designed to counter what he saw as a movement in contemporary literature and thought to de-humanise man. Lewis stayed in Durham, where he was overwhelmed by the cathedral. That Hideous Strength is in fact set in the environs of a university of a similar size to that of Durham ('Edgestow'), though Lewis notes in his preface to the book that this is the only resemblance between the two universities.

It is claimed that Lewis began another science-fiction novel, The Dark Tower, but it is unfinished; it is not clear whether it was intended as part of the same series as the completed novels. The manuscript was eventually published in 1977, though controversy persists about its authenticity.

The Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children and is considered a classic of children's literature. Written between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, the series is Lewis' most popular work having sold over 100 million copies in forty-one languages. It has been adapted several times, complete or in part, for radio, television, stage, and cinema. The series has been published in several different orders, and the preferred reading order for the series is often debated among fans; Douglas Gresham has stated that Lewis preferred that they be read in "Narnian chronology", not the order in which they were published .

The books contain many allusions to Christian ideas which are easily accessible to younger readers; however, the books are not weighty, and can be read for their adventure, colour, and richness of ideas alone. Because of this, they have become favourites of children and adults, Christians and non-Christians. In addition to Christian themes, Lewis also borrows characters from Greek and Roman mythology as well as traditional British and Irish fairy tales. Lewis reportedly based his depiction of Narnia on the geography and scenery of the Mourne Mountains and "that part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough". Lewis cited George MacDonald's Christian fairy tales as an influence in writing the series

Mere Christianity

Lewis is regarded by many as one of the most influential Christian apologists of his time; Mere Christianity was voted best book of the twentieth century by Christianity Today in 2000. Due to Lewis' approach to religious belief as a skeptic, and his following conversion, he has been called "The Apostle to the Skeptics."

Lewis was very much interested in presenting a reasonable case for the truth of Christianity. Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles were all concerned, to one degree or another, with refuting popular objections to Christianity, such as "How could a good God allow pain to exist in the world?". He also became known as a popular lecturer and broadcaster, and some of his writing (including much of Mere Christianity) originated as scripts for radio talks or lectures.

According to George Sayer, a 1948 loss in a debate with Elizabeth Anscombe led to his reevaluating his role as an apologist and his future works concentrated on devotional literature and children's books. Anscombe had a different recollection of the debate's emotional effect on Lewis. Victor Reppert also disputes Sayer, listing some of Lewis post-1948 apologetic publications, including the second and revised edition of his Miracles in 1960.

Lewis also wrote an autobiography titled Surprised by Joy, which places special emphasis on his own conversion. (It was written before he met his wife, Joy Gresham; the title of the book came from the first line of a poem by William Wordsworth.) His essays and public speeches on Christian belief, many of which were collected in God in the Dock and The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, remain popular today.

His most famous works, the Chronicles of Narnia, contain many strong Christian messages and are often considered allegory. Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory, maintained that the books were not allegory, and preferred to call the Christian aspects of them "suppositional".

Other Works

Lewis wrote a number of works on Heaven and Hell. One of these, The Great Divorce, is a short novella in which a few residents of Hell take a bus ride to Heaven, where they are met by people who dwell there. The proposition is that they can stay (in which case they can call the place where they had come from “Purgatory”, instead of “Hell”); but many find it not to their taste. The title is a reference to William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a concept that Lewis found a "disastrous error" (Lewis 1946, p. vii). This work deliberately echoes two other more famous works with a similar theme: the Divine Comedy of Dante Aligheri, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Another short work, The Screwtape Letters, consists of suave letters of advice from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, on the best ways to tempt a particular human and secure his damnation. Lewis’s last novel was Till We Have Faces — he thought of it as his most mature and masterful work of fiction, but it was never a popular success. It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the unusual perspective of Psyche's sister. It is deeply concerned with religious ideas, but the setting is entirely pagan, and the connections with specific Christian beliefs are left implicit.

Before Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, he published two books: Spirits in Bondage, a collection of poems, and Dymer, a single narrative poem. Both were published under the pen name Clive Hamilton.

He also wrote Four Loves, which rhetorically explains four loves including friendship, eros, affection, and charity or caritas.

Reference:

Wikipedia