I’ve never read The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m just throwing it out there now. How can he be in my top five favorite writers if I’ve never read what he is most famous for? Sure, he wrote children’s fantasy fiction, but his writing career included a much wider scope than one genre.
Born in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland, Lewis was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, and Christian apologist. He wrote prolifically in all categories. It’s amazing that he could write the celebrated A Preface to Paradise Lost and the cherished Chronicles. That’s quite a spectrum and to do it so well is incredible. My favorite of his writings are at once scholarly and intellectual and heartfelt and accessible. His book The Problem of Pain compelling seeks to answer the question of why humanity suffers, and his later book A Grief Observed contains his reactions to the same questions directly after his wife had died. His novels The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters are insanely innovative and thought-provoking. Mere Christianity is a classic. His writings seem like they come from both a World War II era Oxford professor and a compassionate, straightforward lay theologian. There’s no one quite like him. This little blurb seems so insufficient, but it’s hard putting the joy that I take from reading his works into words. I’ll borrow what someone else said: “I love… what he has taught me about life, Christianity, nature, beauty, and many other things.”
A Favorite Excerpt:
“‘That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.’
- from The Great Divorce
Famous Works:
The Problem of Pain (1940)
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
The Great Divorce (1945)
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956)
Mere Christianity (1952)
A Grief Observed (1961)
Links:
· http://www.lewissociety.org/
Next Week: #4.
Hint: He's an American Transcendentalist.
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