Today's Honorary Subscriber: Show Biography

C.S. Lewis (1898 - 1963)

Today's Honorary Subscriber is British scholar, novelist, and author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) who wrote some 40 books, most of them on Christian apologetics, the most widely known being "The Screwtape Letters." He also achieved fame with a trilogy of science-fiction novels and with "The Chronicles of Narnia," a series of seven children's books that have become classics of fantasy literature.

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He began his early education at schools in England and Ireland, but ill health forced him to complete his schooling at college in the health resort area of Malvern, England, where he abandoned his childhood Christian faith. In 1917 he became a student at University College, Oxford, only to have his studies interrupted later that year by the outbreak of World War I. He was commissioned an officer in the 3rd Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry, and reached the front line in the Somme Valley in France on his 19th birthday. The following year he was wounded during the Battle of Arras. He was discharged in December 1919, and resumed his studies at University College, Oxford, where he achieved an outstanding record as a classical scholar.

From 1925 to 1954 he was a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, and from 1954 to 1963 he was professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. In 1931 Lewis experienced a reconversion to Christianity, influenced in part by his association with J.R.R. Tolkien, with whom he formed a circle of friends dubbed the "Inklings." The first of Lewis's works to attract attention was
"The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism" (1933). In 1936 came the critical and characteristic "Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition," considered by many to be his finest scholarly work. The first of his science fiction novels (a genre then scarcely known), "Out of the Silent Planet" (1938), was followed by the equally remarkable fictions "Perelandra" (1943) and "That
Hideous Strength" (1945). These three books, which form one of the best of all science fiction trilogies, center on an English linguist named Ransom who voyages to Mars and Venus and becomes involved in a cosmic struggle between good and evil in the solar system.

In 1957 the confirmed bachelor Lewis entered into a bittersweet marriage with Joy Davidman, at the time diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her illness went into remission until 1960, giving them a few years of happiness until her death at age 45. The story of their years together is poignantly told in the 1985 British movie "Shadowlands." Lewis himself died one week before his 65th birthday on Friday, November 22; 1963, the same day on which President Kennedy was assassinated.