The Magician's Nephew

Life and education

Clive Staples Lewis, widely known as C. S. Lewis, was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898 and died in Oxford on 22 November 1963, aged 64. His father, Albert, was a solicitor, and his mother, Florence, had studied mathematics. The family home contained many books, and reading became central to Lewis’s childhood. He and his older brother, Warren, invented imaginary worlds together, an early imaginative practice often associated with Lewis’s later fantasy. His mother died of cancer in 1908, a loss that deeply affected him. He attended schools in Britain and Ireland and received further instruction in classical languages and literature. During the First World War he served in the British Army and was wounded in France. After the war he studied at Oxford, concentrating on classics and English literature and building the scholarly knowledge that informed much of his writing.

In 1925 Lewis became a fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught for many years. In 1954 he took up the chair of medieval and Renaissance literature at the University of Cambridge. His intellectual life included a major change in religious belief: once an atheist, he came to Christianity after years of reflection and discussion, around 1931. Faith became an important influence on his fiction and nonfiction, though his university teaching remained primarily literary and scholarly. Lewis was also a broadcaster. His wartime radio talks about Christian belief and moral reasoning reached a wide British audience and helped establish his reputation beyond the university.

Writing and legacy

Lewis wrote more than thirty books across fantasy, science fiction, literary criticism, autobiography, and Christian thought. His early work The Pilgrim’s Regress appeared in 1933. Out of the Silent Planet (1938) began the science-fiction sequence later known as the Space Trilogy. During the Second World War he developed radio talks that were published in book form as Mere Christianity in 1952. Other influential works include The Screwtape Letters (1942), a satirical series of letters from a senior devil to a junior one; The Great Divorce (1945); and Miracles (1947). His autobiographical Surprised by Joy appeared in 1955.

Lewis’s best-known fiction is The Chronicles of Narnia, seven children’s fantasy novels published between 1950 and 1956. The series includes The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and The Magician’s Nephew (1955), which supplies an origin story for Narnia despite appearing sixth in publication order. Lewis drew on classical literature, Christian ideas, myth, and the pleasures of imaginative adventure, creating stories that could appeal to children while inviting older readers to consider questions of courage, temptation, loyalty, and sacrifice. His fiction made him one of the most widely read writers of children’s fantasy, while his essays and theological works made him a prominent Christian apologist and public intellectual.

In 1956 Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman; she died in 1960. Lewis died in Oxford in 1963 and was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry. His work remains widely read, discussed, translated, and adapted. The combination of academic learning, direct prose, moral argument, and vivid storytelling has secured his reputation across several fields: children’s literature, fantasy, literary scholarship, and Christian thought. His influence endures in readers drawn both to Narnia’s invented world and to the questions about belief and human choice that run through his broader writing.