C.S. Lewis: A Short Biography

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, the son of A.J. Lewis, a solicitor, and Flora Augusta (Hamilton). His mother, a promising mathematician, died when he was nine years old. Lewis had been very close to his mother, who taught him to love books and encouraged him to study French and Latin. Lewis and his brother were brought up by their father.

During his childhood, Lewis created the imaginary country of Bloxen. He started writing early—in the attic of their house he had a "study" where he composed his stories. After attending schools in Hertfordshire, Northern Ireland and Malvern, he was educated at home from 1914-17.

"I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also of endless books," Lewis wrote in his autobiographical book Surprised by Joy (1955).

Lewis's early favorites were Edith Nesbit's books, among them The Story of the Amulet (1906), which mixed fantasy with reality, and the uncut edition of Gulliver's Travels. Later he read the Norse myths and sagas, and such historical books as Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis and Lew Wallace's Ben Hur. Later he also found The Odyssey, Voltaire, Milton and Spenser. Lewis's private tutor taught him to read Greek for pleasure.

Lewis graduated from University College, Oxford, in 1923. He was fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years (1925-54). From 1954 to 1963 he was professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His lectures were crowded—he had a phenomenal memory, and he could speak spontaneously about Greek and Latin texts without notes.

With J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Lewis formed a literary group called “The Inklings,” which took shape in the 1930s. Their Tuesday lunchtime sessions at the Bird and Baby pub became a well known part of Oxford social life. Williams died in 1945, and the meetings faded away in 1949. Lewis preferred the company of men. He considered that women's minds were intrinsically inferior to men's. A visitor at the Socratic Society of Oxford portrayed Lewis as "ruddy of complexion, radiating health, of substantial girth all over, and his eyes sparkled with mirth."

As Surprised by Joy demonstrates, the watershed in Lewis's life was his conversion from atheism to Christianity. He had began to lose his faith at the age of 13, partly due to his deep-rooted pessimism, and partly due to pantheistic experiences and interest in Wagner's music.

After reading such writers as Chesterfield, Bergson, George MacDonald, and George Herbert, and abandoning his youthful snobbery, he became a deist in 1929, and later he was associated with such neo-Christians as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a Catholic.

In the 1930s Lewis started to publish popular religious books, among them A Pilgrim's Regress (1933), a thinly disguised allegory of his own conversion. The Screwtape Letters (1942) was a correspondence from a senior devil to his nephew concerning the latter's task of winning a young man to damnation. The Problem of Pain (1940) asked, "If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow his creatures to suffer pain?" Lewis suggested that much of the suffering in God's world can be traced to the evil choices people make. In his own life, Lewis followed Christian principles. He gave away two-thirds of his income, sat at the bedside of the sick, and personally served the poor.

In Out of Silent Planet (1938) Lewis put his Christian beliefs in the setting of a science fiction story. The book started Lewis's Ransom trilogy, where the achievements of science are in alliance with those of demonic evil. In the first part Ransom is kidnapped by an amoral Wellsian scientist, Weston, and taken to Mars. The series continued in Perelandra (1943), in which an angel carries Ransom to Venus. In That Hideous Strength (1945) Ransom is back on Earth, and calls Merlin to fight against an unpleasant scientific organization, the NICE.

The Chronicles of Narnia has turned out to be the most lasting of Lewis's novels. "I wrote the books I should have liked to read," Lewis said. "That's always been my reason for writing." The Chronicles tell the story of a group of children, who come into contact with the mysterious other world of Narnia, where the lion Aslan is the prototype of Christ. "I don't know where the Lion came from or why He came," Lewis explained later. "But once He was there He pulled the whole story together."

The portal to Narnia, a kind of medieval vision of Paradise, is a wardrobe through which the four sibling children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy enter a secondary world. In the first story the bad Witch is destroyed in a battle. In the sequels the children travel in Narnia and meet sea monsters, dragons, mermaids, wizards and other creatures. Turbaned, dark-skinned people called Calormenes, who worship a demon named Tash, also cause trouble—Lewis's view of Muslims couldn't be more explicit.

The final books deal with Narnia's beginning and end. In the last Armageddon story, with its death-and-resurrection theme, the struggle is between young King Tirian and the forces of evil, as represented by Shift the Ape and Puzzle the donkey. The harmony of Narnia is destroyed and Father Time puts out the sun. Jill and Eustache appear from a railway train to help young Tirian, "last of the Kings of Narnia." Aslan reveals the truth: the children were killed in a railway accident. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning." Lewis ends the book telling that they lived happily ever after—it was for them only the beginning of the real story.

Lewis was briefly married to Joy Davidman, a Jewish American divorcee. They met in 1953, but their correspondence had started before it. Lewis's years at Cambridge were happy—Joy Davidman was always good-humoured and shared his delight in argument for argument's sake. She died of cancer in 1960. Lewis's notes from this period was published under the title A Grief Observed (1961) The relationship was the subject of the film Shadowlands (1994), directed by William Nicholson and starring Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins. Lewis died of osteoporosis on November 22, 1963.

source: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/cslewis.htm