C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis, known as C. S. Lewis, was a British author, literary scholar and Anglican lay theologian who lived from 1898 to 1963. He held academic positions in English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954 and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1954 to 1963. He is best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and he also wrote other fiction, including The Screwtape Letters and The Space Trilogy, alongside non-fiction works of Christian apologetics such as Mere Christianity, Miracles and The Problem of Pain. Lewis was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, and both were active in the Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. According to his own 1955 memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis was baptized in the Church of Ireland, fell away from his faith in adolescence, and returned to Anglicanism at the age of 32 under the influence of Tolkien and other friends, becoming an ordinary layman of the Church of England. His wartime radio broadcasts on Christianity brought him wide acclaim. He wrote more than 30 books, translated into over 30 languages, and in 1956 he married the American writer Joy Davidman, who died of cancer four years later. Lewis died on 22 November 1963 of kidney failure, and in 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, he was honored with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.