Guide Through the Wardrobe
A literary scholar who joined lucid argument to mythic imagination, writing fantasy, criticism and Christian apologetics for readers of strikingly different ages.
Writer, Literary Scholar & Christian Apologist
Lewis was born in Belfast and created imaginary worlds with his brother Warnie. His mother’s death marked his childhood; service on the Western Front and a combat wound interrupted his Oxford education.
As a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, Lewis studied medieval and Renaissance literature. Friendship with Tolkien and others helped reopen questions of myth and belief; Lewis returned to Christianity in 1931.
BBC talks during the Second World War addressed moral choice and Christian belief in direct language. Revised together, they became Mere Christianity, while The Screwtape Letters approached temptation through comic inversion.
Seven Chronicles of Narnia joined fairy tale, classical and northern myth, talking animals and Christian imagination. Lewis did not build Narnia as a coded equation; its images generate their own narrative life.
Lewis became Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His marriage to Joy Davidman brought late happiness and bereavement; A Grief Observed records mourning without smoothing away doubt or anger. He died in 1963.
J. R. R. TolkienThe Inklings, myth and the craft of imagined worlds
Joseph CampbellDifferent ways of connecting mythic images with modern life
