Who is cl lewis

He also gained acclaim for his popular apologetics, including such works as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. What is more, he gained acclaim as a science fiction writer for his Ransom Trilogy. Over the years, the print runs have grown.

Even though several movies and stage plays have told the story of Lewis, along with a handful of biographies, many people who know of his work may be surprised by the Lewis they do not know. Lewis was not English. He was Irish. Because of his long association with Oxford University, and later with Cambridge, many people assume he was English.

When he first went to school in England as a boy, he had a strong Irish accent. Both the students and the headmaster made fun of young Lewis, and he hated the English in turn. It would be many years before he overcame his prejudice against the English. Lewis could not play team sports.

Perhaps it would be better to say that he could not succeed at team sports. One of the features of human anatomy that separates us from the lower primates is the two-jointed thumb, which helped us enormously in the development of technology and civilization. Lewis and his brother Warnie had only one joint in their thumbs which left them hopeless at throwing, catching, or hitting balls. As a result of his failure on the playing field, young Lewis was subjected to ridicule and abuse from the other students at school and made to feel unworthy to draw breath.

Lewis was a shy man. In spite of his great skill at debate and his mastery of the platform in holding an audience of hundreds in the palm of his hand, Lewis was shy in everyday encounters with other people he did not know. His enormous publishing success came in spite of his inability to put himself forward instead of from any effort on his part to market himself.

Lewis gave away the royalties from his books. Though he had only a modest salary as a tutor at Magdalen College, Lewis set up a charitable trust to give away whatever money he received from his books.

Having given away his royalties when he first began this practice, he was startled to learn that the government still expected him to pay taxes on the money he had earned! Lewis never expected to make any money from his books.

He was sure they would all be out of print by the time he died. Still earlier, as a boy, he had created Boxen—an imaginary world where animals talked and had adventures. Lastly, he was highly favored in that he had a decades-long friendship with J. There were other influences upon him, but these aspects of his life proved crucial catalysts for him to pen the Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis and Tolkien were both members of a celebrated literary circle, The Inklings, which met at Oxford.

This opened an unexpected door of ministry, for many of his correspondents were Christians, as he was, or were interested in the truth claims of Christianity.

Their love story formed the basis of the celebrated film, Shadowlands, directed by Sir Richard Attenborough. Publishes The Screwtape Letters.

Publishes The Abolition of Man. Publishes the second novel in the Space Trilogy series, Perelandra. Publishes The Great Divorce. Publishes Miracles. Publishes Surprised By Joy. Publishes Till We Have Faces. Publishes Reflections on the Psalms. Becomes, with T. Eliot, a member of the Commission to Revise the Psalter.

Publishes The Four Loves. Publishes Studies in Words. Publishes A Grief Observed under the pseudonym N.