C S Lewis

Discovering C. S. Lewis

After diving into the Narnia books, and even more recently enjoying the Narnia movies, I couldn't help wondering about the person behind the stories. After all, these are truly classics and I don't know many grown men who write in depth "children's stories". C. S. Lewis is an individual as complex as the stories themselves.

Three reasons to love C S Lewis

Master Storyteller

C.S.Lewis was able to envision things on more than one level at a time. He wrote a series of stories that were meant to be more than just fairy tales. His Narnia series was a commentary on Christianity as well as a children's tale. It is easy for a child to see the death and resurrection of Aslan as a parallel for Jesus and Lewis did it in a way that fascinated his readers.

If you have seen the movie, Shadowlands, you realize that 'Jack' was probably not the easiest man to live with. One of the reasons he married Joy Gresham was because he saw her as an intellectual equal and thus someone able to be his friend. Imagine his surprise to find love waiting for him in that marriage of convenience.

But there is so much more to C.S.Lewis than we find on the movie screen. Raised in the church as a boy, from the ages of 15 to 33 he claimed to be an athiest. After reading George MacDonald and conversing with J.R.Tolkien, he embraced Christianity. It gave him a unique perspective on his faith which led to the Screwtape Letters.

The more you learn about C. S. Lewis, the more fascinating he seems but then, only a complex individual could create such a world as Narnia.

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 ? 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends as Jack, was a medievalist, Christian apologist, literary critic, academic, radio broadcaster, and essayist. 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, and in cinema. Examples include the 1988 BBC TV serialisation, the 2005 film adaptation of Category: The Chronicles of Narnia - : The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe|The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the 2008 film adaptation of Category: The Chronicles of Narnia - : Prince Caspian|Prince Caspian.

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