Author C. S. Lewis

Christianity brought him wide acclaim. In 1956, he married the American writer Joy Gresham, 17 years his junior, who died four years later of cancer at the age of 45. Lewis died three years after his wife, as the result of a heart attack. His death came one week before what would have been his 65th birthday. Media coverage of his death was minimal, as he died on 22 November 1963 – the same day that U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the same day as the death of another famous author, Aldous Huxley. Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies over the years. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularised on stage, in TV, in radio, and in cinema. Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on 29 November 1898. His father was Albert James Lewis (1863–1929), a solicitor whose father, Richard, had come to Ireland from Wales during the mid 19th century. His mother was Florence (Flora) Augusta Lewis née Hamilton (1862–1908), the daughter of a Church of Ireland (Anglican) priest. He had one older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis (Warnie). At the age of four, shortly after his dog Jacksie died when run over by a car, Lewis announced that his name was now Jacksie. At first he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life. When he was seven, his family moved into "Little Lea", the house the elder Mr. Lewis built for Mrs. Lewis, in the Strandtown area of East Belfast. Lewis was initially schooled by private tutors before being sent to the Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, in 1908, just after his mother's death from cancer. Lewis's brother had already enrolled there three years previously. The school was closed not long afterwards due to a lack of pupils — the headmaster Robert "Oldie" Capron was soon after committed to a psychiatric hospital. Tellingly, in Surprised By Joy, Lewis would nickname the school (and place) "Belsen".[3] After Wynyard closed, Lewis attended Campbell College in the east of Belfast about a mile from his home, but he left after a few months due to respiratory problems. As a result of his illness, Lewis was sent to the health-resort town of Malvern, Worcestershire, where he attended the preparatory school Cherbourg House (called "Chartres" in Lewis's autobiography). In September 1913, Lewis enrolled at Malvern College, where he would remain until the following June. It was during this time that 15-year-old Lewis abandoned his childhood Christian faith and became an atheist, becoming interested in mythology and the occult.[4] Later he would describe "Wyvern" (as he styled the school in his autobiography) as so singularly focused on increasing one's social status that he came to see the homosexual relationships between older and younger pupils as "the one oasis (though green only with weeds and moist only with fetid water) in the burning desert of competitive ambition. […] A perversion was the only thing left through which something spontaneous and uncalculated could creep".[5] After leaving Malvern he moved to study privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father's old tutor and former headmaster of Lurgan College. As a young boy, Lewis had a fascination with anthropomorphic animals, falling in love with Beatrix Potter's stories and often writing and illustrating his own animal stories. He and his brother Warnie together created the world of Boxen, inhabited and run by animals. Lewis loved to read, and as his father’s house was filled with books, he felt that finding a book to read was as easy as walking into a field and "finding a new blade of grass."[6] As a teenager, he was wonderstruck by the songs and legends of what he called Northernness, the ancient literature of Scandinavia preserved in the Icelandic sagas. These legends intensified a longing he had within, a deep desire he would later call "joy". He also grew to love nature — the beauty of nature reminded him of the stories of the North, and the stories of the North reminded him of the beauties of nature. His writing in his teenage years moved away from the tales of Boxen, and he began to use different art forms (epic poetry and opera) to try to capture his new-found interest in Norse mythology and the natural world. Studying with Kirkpatrick (“The Great Knock”, as Lewis afterwards called him) instilled in him a love of Greek literature and mythology, and sharpened his skills in debate and clear reasoning. Having won a scholarship to University College, Oxford in 1917, Lewis volunteered the following year in the British Army as World War I raged on, and was commissioned an officer in the Third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry. Lewis arrived at the front line in the Somme Valley in France on his nineteenth birthday, and experienced trench warfare. On 15 April 1918 Lewis was wounded during the German spring offensive, and suffered some depression during his convalescence, due in part to missing his Irish home. Upon his recovery in October, he was assigned to duty in Andover, England. He was discharged in December 1918, and soon returned to his studies. Lewis received a First in Honour Moderations (Greek and Latin Literature) in 1920, a First in Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History) in 1922, and a First in English in 1923. While being trained for the army Lewis shared a room with another cadet, Edward Courtnay Francis "Paddy" Moore (1898–1918). Maureen Moore, Paddy's sister, claimed that the two made a mutual pact[7] that if either died during the war, the survivor would take care of both their families. Paddy was killed in action in 1918 and Lewis kept his promise. Paddy had earlier introduced Lewis to his mother, Jane King Moore, and a friendship very quickly sprang up between Lewis, who was eighteen when they met, and Jane, who was forty-five. The friendship with Mrs. Moore was particularly important to Lewis while he was recovering from his wounds in hospital, as his father, who had an almost pathological reluctance to break free from the routine of his Belfast practice, could not bring himself to visit Lewis. Lewis lived with and cared for Mrs. Moore until she was hospitalized in the late 1940s. He routinely introduced her as his "mother", and referred to her as such in letters. Lewis, whose own mother had died when he was a child and whose father was distant, demanding and eccentric, developed a deeply affectionate friendship with Mrs. Moore. In his biography of Lewis, A.N.Wilson makes a case for supposing that Lewis and Mrs Moore were, for a time, lovers. Surprised by Joy, Lewis's autobiography, is silent about his relationship with Moore and yet Wilson puts forth evidence to show that Lewis was supporting both Moore and her daughter in rented accommodation near to his digs in Oxford. Furthermore, in Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes of this period of his life, "I was returned to Oxford — 'demobbed — in January 1919. But before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice in this reticence. All I can or need to say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged". In writing this, Lewis of course invites speculation. Wilson presents evidence which shows that, whatever the full extent of the relations between Moore and himself, their relationship during his undergraduate years could indeed be described as both 'huge' and 'complex'. Lewis himself spoke well of Mrs Moore throughout his life saying to his friend George Sayer: "She was generous and taught me to be generous, too." In December 1917 Lewis wrote in a letter to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves that Jane and Greeves were "the two people who matter most to me in the world." In 1930, Lewis and his brother Warnie moved, with Moore and her daughter Maureen, into "The Kilns", a house in the district of Headington Quarry on the outskirts of Oxford (now part of the suburb of Risinghurst). They all contributed financially to the purchase of the house, which passed to Maureen, then Dame Maureen Dunbar, Btss., when Warren died in 1973. Moore suffered from dementia in her later years and was eventually moved into a nursing home, where she died in 1951. Lewis visited her every day in this home until her death. Lewis experienced a certain cultural shock on first arriving in England: "No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions of England," Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, continuing, "The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape … I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal."[3] From boyhood Lewis immersed himself firstly in Norse and Greek and then in Irish mythology and literature and expressed an interest in the Irish language, though he seems to have made little attempt to learn it. He developed a particular fondness for W. B. Yeats, in part because of Yeats’s use of Ireland’s Celtic heritage in poetry. In a letter to a friend Lewis wrote, "I have here discovered an author exactly after my own heart, whom I am sure you would delight in, W. B. Yeats. He writes plays and poems of rare spirit and beauty about our old Irish mythology."