C. S. Lewis was an Oxford and Cambridge scholar of medieval literature who became, through books, broadcasts and children's stories, perhaps the most widely read Christian writer of the twentieth century.
Clive Staples Lewis — "Jack" to his friends — was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898. His mother died when he was nine. After schools in England he won a place at Oxford, but served first in the trenches of the First World War and was wounded at the Battle of Arras in 1918.
From atheism to faith
Lewis was an atheist through his youth. In 1925 he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He came first to believe in God — in 1929 by his own account, in 1930 by the reckoning of his biographer Alister McGrath — and in 1931, after a long night's conversation with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson about myth and the Gospels, to faith in Christ. He told the story in Surprised by Joy (1955). With Tolkien and others he met as the Inklings to read their work aloud.
Writer and broadcaster
The Screwtape Letters (1942) made him famous. His wartime talks on BBC radio, published together as Mere Christianity (1952), set out the faith common to Christians of every tradition. The seven Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956), beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, carried the same faith to generations of children.
In 1954 he moved to a new chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. In 1956 he married the American writer Joy Davidman; her death from cancer in 1960 led to A Grief Observed. Lewis died at his home in Oxford on 22 November 1963, the same day as President Kennedy.