**C.S. Lewis Biography (2): From the Inklings to Narnia, 1932-1963**

• Les Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien and their friends read their texts at the pub.
• BBC talks from 1941 to 1944: Lewis becomes a famous voice.
• Narnia: seven volumes from 1950 to 1956.
• Late marriage to Joy Davidman, who died in 1960; Lewis died on November 22, 1963.

The Inklings

In the early 1930s, a small circle of friends formed around Lewis and Tolkien: the Inklings. They met on Thursday evenings in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College, and on Tuesday afternoons at the Eagle and Child pub, nicknamed “The Bird and Baby.” Here they read aloud works in progress: early chapters of The Lord of the Rings, novels by Charles Williams, and Lewis’s own works. Warnie (Lewis’s brother), Owen Barfield, the doctor Robert Havard, and others were part of the group. From 1930, Lewis lived at the Kilns, a house on the edge of Oxford, with his brother and Mrs Moore.

In brief

In 1936, The Allegory of Love, a study of medieval love poetry, established him as a leading critic. In 1938, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published, the first volume of a “cosmic trilogy” of Christian science fiction, followed by Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945).

On screen

The Problem of Pain (1940) brought him to the attention of the general public. From 1941 to 1944, the BBC invited him to give a series of radio talks on Christian faith. During the war, his voice became one of the most famous in Britain after Churchill’s. These talks were later compiled into Mere Christianity (1952). In 1942, The Screwtape Letters, the letters of a senior demon to his nephew, was a huge success. On September 8, 1947, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Narnia

In 1939, the Kilns housed evacuated schoolgirls from London. Lewis began a story about children entering another world, but abandoned it. He resumed it in 1948-1949: it would become The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950. Six more volumes followed, one per year, up to The Last Battle (1956), which won the Carnegie Medal. Tolkien did not care much for these tales, but children all over the world adopted them.

Did you know

In 1954, Cambridge created a chair of medieval and Renaissance literature for him at Magdalene College. He continued to live at the Kilns, however. He had met Joy Davidman in 1952, an American Jewish poetess, former communist, who converted to Christianity partly because of his books. At first their relationship was intellectual. In 1956, he married her civilly so she could remain in England with her two sons. When her cancer was discovered, the marriage of convenience became a true love: a priest married them at Joy’s bedside in March 1957. An unexpected remission gave them three happy years, including a trip to Greece. Joy died on July 13, 1960. Lewis wrote about his grief in A Grief Observed (1961), published under a pseudonym. Their story inspired the film Shadowlands (1993).

Going further

Ill with heart and kidney disease, Lewis gave up his chair in 1963. He died at the Kilns on November 22, 1963, a week before his 65th birthday, the same day as John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Aldous Huxley’s death. He is buried in the Holy Trinity churchyard in Headington Quarry. In 2013, a plaque in his honor was placed in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.

Three Lewis’s

Recognized expert of medieval literature, storyteller of Narnia and interplanetary worlds, popular defender of the Christian faith: Lewis left behind some forty books, still read all over the world. The purpose of this site is also to discover this writer beyond the wardrobe.

See also

• C.S. Lewis Biography (1) : From Belfast to Oxford, 1898–1931
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• Timeline of C.S. Lewis’s Life
• The Inklings
• From Belfast to the Wardrobe: Jack’s life in ten riddles and how they echo in Narnia
• The Last of the Dinosaurs: A medievalist at Oxford and Cambridge, and what Narnia owes to his library
• Reasoning or storytelling? Lewis’s two pleas and those who answered them
• Susan, Orual and Joy: Reopening the “Lewis misogynist” file with new evidence