From Belfast atheist to Narnia and Oxford rooms
Clive Staples Lewis held English chairs at Magdalen, Oxford, then Magdalene, Cambridge, while publishing more than thirty books translated into dozens of languages. A wartime Somme veteran and Inklings companion of Tolkien, he returned to Anglican faith at thirty-two and died the day Kennedy was shot.
Born in Belfast on 29 November 1898, Lewis renamed himself after his dog Jacksie died and, with brother Warnie, invented the animal kingdom of Boxen. Mother Flora's death in 1908 sent him to English schools where he abandoned childhood Christianity for atheism, Norse sagas, and what he called Northernness—a longing he later named joy. Schoolmate Donald Hardman remembered a riotously foul-mouthed unbeliever staggered to find the same man writing The Screwtape Letters.
Oxford followed: Firsts in Honour Moderations, Greats, and English; a fellowship at Magdalen from 1925; friendship with Tolkien in the informal Inklings circle. Surprised by Joy records baptism in the Church of Ireland, adolescent apostasy, and return to Anglican lay belief under friends' influence. Wartime service wounded him on the Somme; he kept a pact to support the Moore family after Paddy Moore fell in 1918. His Belfast sectarian backdrop, critics note, may have pushed him toward Chesterton's idea of mere Christianity shared across denominations.
Fiction ranges from Narnia's seven volumes—stage, screen, and radio staples—to The Screwtape Letters and the Space Trilogy; apologetics include Mere Christianity and wartime broadcasts. He married American writer Joy Davidman in 1956; her death four years later at forty-five preceded his own on 22 November 1963 from kidney failure at sixty-four. Westminster Abbey placed a Poets' Corner memorial on the fiftieth anniversary. Yeats, Irish identity, and Oxford rooms frame a career that turned childhood Boxen into books millions still read.
Source: C. S. Lewis
