Biography
Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was a solicitor and his mother, Flora, the daughter of a clergyman. He and his older brother, Warren, grew up in a house full of books, and the two boys made up stories together. In 1908, when Jack was nine, his mother died of cancer. The grief left a mark on him that never fully healed, and his father withdrew into his own sorrow. Jack was sent away to boarding schools in England, where he was unhappy, and he lost the simple faith of his childhood. By his mid-teens he called himself an atheist.
He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, in 1916, but the war interrupted his studies. He served as an officer in the trenches of France and was wounded at the battle of Arras in 1918. He lost close friends in the fighting. He returned to Oxford and took a triple first, in classics, philosophy and English. In 1925 he was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, where he taught English literature for nearly thirty years. He also shared a home with Mrs. Janie Moore, the mother of a friend killed in the war, whom he cared for until her death.
He was drawn back to belief slowly, and against his own will. He read widely and found that the books he loved most were written by Christians. In friendship with colleagues at Oxford, among them J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, he found that the faith was more serious than he had thought. In 1929, as he later wrote, he gave in and admitted that God was God, kneeling in prayer and feeling himself perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. Two years later, on a journey to the Whipsnade zoo, he came to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
He turned his gifts to explaining the faith. During the Second World War, he gave a series of radio talks for the BBC, which were later gathered into Mere Christianity. The Screwtape Letters, a book of letters from a senior devil to a junior tempter, came out in 1942. The Problem of Pain, Miracles and The Great Divorce followed. He also wrote the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia, beginning in 1950 with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which have been read by millions of children and adults. In them the great story of the gospel is told in a world of talking animals and a lion named Aslan.
In 1954 he took a chair at Cambridge University. In 1956 he married Joy Davidman, an American writer, in a civil ceremony so that she could remain in Britain, and in 1957 the marriage was blessed in a Christian service when she was ill with cancer. They were happy together, but she died in 1960. His book A Grief Observed records his grief with painful honesty, including his doubts about the goodness of God. He admitted that he was not free of anger and that his faith had been shaken.
He was not a flawless man. He smoked heavily, drank beer and was fond of argument, and he could be sharp with those who disagreed with him. Some evangelicals were uneasy about his views on certain doctrines and about his habits. He did not claim to be a theologian and called himself an ordinary layman of the Church of England. He often said that he wrote to explain what all Christians have always believed.
His health declined in the early 1960s, and he resigned his post at Cambridge in 1963. He died on November 22, 1963, at his home in Oxford, a week before his sixty-fifth birthday. The same day, the American president John F. Kennedy was shot, and Lewis's death passed almost unnoticed. His books have sold in the hundreds of millions. His life shows that the God who pursues a man can win an unwilling mind, and that a clear explanation of the gospel, written with honesty, can reach people for generations.