C.S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898 and spent his career teaching English literature, at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954 and then at Magdalene College, Cambridge, until his death in 1963. He gave up the Christianity of his childhood and returned to it at 32, partly through the influence of J. R. R. Tolkien, his Oxford colleague and fellow member of the Inklings writers' group.

His faith runs through most of what followed. The Screwtape Letters (1942), dedicated to Tolkien, is a satire written as letters of advice from a senior demon to his nephew, and Mere Christianity (1952) grew out of BBC radio talks he gave between 1941 and 1944. His fiction ranges from the Space Trilogy, begun with Out of the Silent Planet in 1938, to Till We Have Faces (1956), a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth that he considered his most mature novel. The seven Chronicles of Narnia, written between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, have sold more than 100 million copies in 41 languages. He married the American writer Joy Davidman in 1956; after her death in 1960 he published A Grief Observed under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk.

Start Narnia with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), not The Magician's Nephew. Lewis wrote Lion first, without planning a series, and it introduces Narnia through children who know nothing about it. The Magician's Nephew is a prequel written several years later, and scholars such as Peter Schakel argue that its early events land harder as a flashback, after the reader already knows the world. Continue with Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Adults looking past Narnia have two good entry points. The Screwtape Letters puts his arguments about temptation into satirical, fictional form and needs no background. Till We Have Faces is the more demanding choice: a mythic novel written for adults, which Lewis rated above his other fiction even though it never became a popular success.