Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898, the son of a solicitor and a mathematician's daughter who died of cancer when he was nine. Educated at Oxford, where he later taught English literature for nearly three decades before moving to a newly created chair at Cambridge, he was by training a medievalist and by temperament a logician. He was also, for much of his early adulthood, a convinced atheist — a fact he never minimized when describing his eventual conversion to Christianity in his thirties, which he recounted with characteristic precision in his spiritual autobiography, *Surprised by Joy*.
Lewis came to faith against the grain of mid-twentieth-century intellectual culture, at a moment when Christian belief had largely retreated from the educated mainstream of British public life. He wrote amid two world wars, the dissolution of empire, and a pervasive philosophical skepticism, and he chose to engage that climate directly rather than withdraw from it. His friendships with J. R. R. Tolkien and the other writers of the Inklings circle shaped his conviction that story and myth could carry theological truth in ways that argument alone could not.
His devotional and apologetic contribution was, above all, one of accessibility without condescension. In works such as *Mere Christianity*, *The Screwtape Letters*, and *The Problem of Pain*, he translated classical Christian doctrine into language a skeptical general reader could follow, while his fiction — the Narnia series and the Space Trilogy — explored themes of redemption, obedience, and longing through sustained narrative imagination. He was equally candid about suffering and doubt, and his late memoir *A Grief Observed*, written after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, stands as one of the more honest accounts of faith under strain in modern religious writing.
Lewis died on 22 November 1963, the same afternoon John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a coincidence that briefly obscured his passing; his readers, numbering in the tens of millions, have ensured that the oversight was temporary.