Lewis, Clive Staples

(1898-1963)

   C.S. Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, the son of a solicitor, started at University College, Oxford, in 1917, then enlisted into the Somerset Light Infantry. Wounded in the battle of Arras in April 1918, he returned to Oxford in 1919 to read classics. In 1925 Magdalen College elected him as a fellow and tutor in English language and literature, a post he held for nearly thirty years. The Screwtape Letters (1942) were highly popular and through these and his broadcasts on Christian topics, which began in August 1941, he became internationally known. The Narnia series of children's tales, begun in 1948, revealed a new facet of his imaginative gifts. He was professor in English medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge. He married Helen Joy Davidman of New York and when she died in 1960 he published the profound A Grief Observed (1961). Lewis was buried at Holy Trinity Church, Headington, Oxford. The film Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins, was based on an original stage and television play (1993). Some of his poems: "After Prayers, Lie Cold," "Ballade of Dead Gentlemen," "Grief 's Circle," "Joys That Sting," "Stephen to Lazarus."

   Sources: A Little Book of Comfort. Anthony Guest, ed. HarperCollins, 1993. A Sacrifice of Praise: An Antholog y of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century. James H. Trott, ed. Cumberland House Publishing, 1999. Art and Love: An Illustrated Antholog y of Love Poetry. Kate Farrell, ed. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Everyman's Book of English Verse. John Wain, ed. J.M. Dent, 1981. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Comic Verse. John Gross, ed. Oxford University Press, 1994. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.