While I was searching for our November 2024 author birthday, I came across a blog post from Pivotal Historical Moments Fan (Tony Valerino) about C.S. Lewis.

Clive Staples Lewis was born 29 November 1898 in Belfast, Ireland and died 22 November 1963 in Oxford, England.

He was a novelist, scholar, and broadcaster.

Instead of doing our usual bio, I thought Pivotal Historical Moments Fan’s blog post would be a fun change. Special thanks to Tony Valerino for letting us share it in This Awful Awesome Life. (I’ve included a list of Lewis’ most notable works at the end of the blog.) Enjoy!

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In the waning twilight of an English autumn, the scholar who would forever change children’s literature sat in his modest, book-cluttered study. C.S. Lewis, known to his friends as “Jack,” had not set out to write fantasy. His days at Oxford, steeped in the intellectual rigors of philosophy and medieval literature, were a stark contrast to the imaginings that had begun to invade his thoughts. In an era when Europe still bore the scars of two world wars, a scholar like Lewis was expected to keep his feet firmly planted in reality. He had once been an atheist, hardened by personal loss and the devastation he had witnessed as a young soldier in the trenches of World War I. For years, he had turned away from the divine, finding solace only in reason. Yet, as the rain tapped insistently against his window, there was something—a persistent idea—that gnawed at the edges of his mind. It was more than a literary notion; it was as if his theological journey, his slow conversion to Christianity, was demanding expression in a form he could not yet articulate. It began, quite simply, with the image of a faun carrying an umbrella through a snow-covered wood. There was no grand plan, no deliberate attempt to craft an epic. But beneath that whimsical image, something deeper stirred.

The idea grew. What was initially a passing fancy evolved into a sprawling narrative, as if his newfound faith had unlocked the door to an entire world of wonder. Lewis, who had spent years grappling with the logical arguments for and against Christianity, now found himself enveloped in something mysterious, imaginative, and deeply spiritual. As he sat at his desk, his fingers hovering above the typewriter keys, he hesitated for just a moment. The lion, Aslan, appeared to him like a flash of divine inspiration, a symbol of the Christ he had come to believe in after so many years of skepticism. Aslan was no mere character, but a reflection of the grace and redemption Lewis had discovered through his friendship with fellow Christian writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. It was not that Lewis chose to write about Aslan; it was as if Aslan had chosen him. The world of Narnia unfolded rapidly in his mind, its landscapes both familiar and strange, a blend of his theological reflections and childhood wonder. In a flurry of creativity, he gave in to the pull of the story, the weight of it pressing down on him until it was fully realized—a fantastical realm born not just from imagination, but from the depths of a soul once lost and now found.

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Notable Works by C.S. Lewis:

The Chronicles of Narnia

Mere Christianity

The Allegory of Love

The Screwtape Letters

The Abolition of Man

The Space Trilogy

Till We Have Faces

Surprised by Joy

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Photo Credit:

By Source: Scan of photograph by Arthur Strong, 1947Specific source for the zealot: https://timfall.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/c-s-lewis3.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7049156

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