Very few books endure the way really good children’s books do. It has something to do with the way you fall in love with a book and its characters when you are a child. Suspension of disbelief is easier; imagination and emotional response to fictional characters comes more naturally when you still believe in magic a little bit. I still get warm nostalgic feelings about books by Enid Blyton, E Nesbit and, of course, Clive Staples Lewis.

Lewis was most famous for the Narnia books, but he was a prolific writer, producing several science fiction books, an auto-biography, several treatises on Christianity and one of the most heartrendingly honest books about grief ever written. He was a deeply complex and conflicted man; a soldier, a teacher, a scholar, a writer, an atheist and, eventually, an intellectual Christian apologist. Like his beloved friend Tolkien, movies of his books have renewed his fame in recent years, but he hated the very idea of making a movie of his books. Imagination, he thought, should stand alone without aids.

Douglas Gresham, his stepson described him thus: I think first and foremost, he was a Christian, secondly he was a scholar. And he was probably the most intelligent man I have ever met in my life. And secondly, probably the most widely read man I have ever met in my life. … He had an uncanny ability to take what seemed to be the most complex of issues and reduce them to such simple language that anyone could understand what he was talking about. He was also a man who, although conscious of his own sinfulness, was at the same time equally conscious of his own forgiveness. And this gave him a great sense of joy in life. He was a very humorous man, a great wit, great fun to be with. A conversation with Jack was mostly laughter. He was warm, compassionate extraordinarily humorous and a good companion.

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on 29 November 1898. His father, Albert James Lewis, was a solicitor whose father had come to Ireland from Wales during the mid 19th century. His mother, Florence Augusta Lewis was the daughter of an Anglican priest. He had one older brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis.

When he was four his dog, Jacksie, was killed by a car. Heartbroken, Lewis announced everyone was to call him Jacksie and thereafter would answer to no other name. He was known to friends and family as Jack for the rest of his life.

Lewis grew up in a house filled with books and he was a voracious reader. He fell in love with Beatrix Potter’s stories at a very young age and he retained a lifelong fascination with anthropomorphic animals; he was writing and illustrating his own animal stories by the time he was 7. He and his brother, whom he called Warnie, created a world they named Boxen, which was entirely inhabited and run by animals.

Lewis’s mother died of cancer when he was 10, and, in the same year his father’s brother and father died. Lewis said that “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life”. He and Warren became more reliant on each other, but their relationship with their father became increasingly distant.

Almost immediately after her death his father sent him to join his brother at boarding school in Hertfordshire and the battering of change didn’t stop there, the school was closed only a few months after Lewis started, due to a lack of pupils, and the headmaster Robert Capron was soon after committed to a psychiatric hospital. Lewis then attended Campbell College in the east of Belfast about a mile from his home, but he left after a few months when he developed severe respiratory problems. He was then sent to the health-resort town of Malvern, Worcestershire, where he attended the preparatory school Cherbourg House until 1913, when he was enrolled at Malvern College, where he remained until the following June.

Unsurprisingly, given the grief and upheavals he had endured, at 15 Lewis abandoned his Christianity, unable to reconcile his pain with the God he had be taught to worship. He described himself as an atheist, albeit one who was “angry with God for not existing”.

Around this time he discovered the songs and legends of what he called Northernness, the ancient literature of Scandinavia preserved in the Icelandic sagas. His teenage writings moved away from the tales of Boxen, and he began using different art forms (epic poetry and opera) to try to capture his new-found interest in Norse mythology and longstanding interest in the natural world.

After leaving Malvern College, Lewis commenced private study with W.T. Kirkpatrick, “The Great Knock” who instilled in him a love of Greek literature and sharpened his skills in debate and sound reasoning. Then, in 1916, Lewis was awarded a scholarship at University College, Oxford.

Lewis started at Oxford in April 1917, but upon the outbreak of WWI, he enlisted in the British army and was billeted in Keble College, Oxford, for officer training. He and his roommate, Edward “Paddy” Moore became close friends and promised each other that if either died during the war, the survivor would take care of both their families.

Lewis was commissioned as an officer in the 3rd Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry, on September 25, and reached the front line in the Somme Valley on his 19th birthday. He was wounded on Mount Berenchon during the Battle of Arras by an English shell falling short of its target. Upon his recovery in October, he was assigned to duty in Andover, England.

Paddy was killed in battle in 1918 and buried in the field just south of Peronne, but before his death he had introduced Lewis to his mother, Jane Moore, and a close friendship developed between the then 18 year old Lewis and 45 year old Jane.

During the summer of 1920, Jane and her daughter, Maureen, moved to Oxford and six months later Lewis moved in with them. They stayed together for more than 20 years, until Mrs Moore, suffering from dementia, was moved into a nursing home, where she died in 1951. Lewis, whose mother had died when he was a child and whose father was distant, demanding and eccentric, had a deeply loving but non-sexual relationship with Mrs Moore. He routinely introduced her as his mother and he visited her nursing home everyday until her death.

Lewis returned to his academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford, where he won a triple first (the highest honours) in three areas of study. He then taught as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years, from 1925 to 1954, and later was the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Lewis’s return to Christianity was not a sudden experience. He always claimed it was logical and rational, not emotional. His influences were, as always, books and a few close friends.

Lewis had several Christian friends at Oxford, including Hugo Dyson and the Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien, with whom he often argued philosophy and religion. It was long conversations with these two beloved and devout friends that finally convinced him to abandon atheism and return to Christianity.

In September of 1952, he met Joy Davidman Gresham, the ex-wife of novelist William L. Gresham. She was an American writer of Jewish background who also converted from atheism to Christianity, so they had much in common.

She and Lewis were friends and intellectual companions, but not lovers when they entered into a civil marriage in 1956 in order to prevent her threatened deportation by British migration authorities. Almost immediately afterwards she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer and their relationship changed; they had a Church of England wedding at her hospital bed in March 1957, but she was not expected to live more than a few weeks.

Her son Douglas Gresham was once asked if there was romantic love between them. He said: Oh yes, enormously. But again this is something that grew larger and greater after they were married. They were married in the hospital, she came home to die, but she went into remission. And they had the happiest four years of their lives. And I don’t think I have ever seen two people more in love. I mean there are some times when you see a young couple head over heels in love with each other in every sense of the word love. And they almost carry an aura of it with them. Well Jack and my mother in mddle age developed this immensely powerful love for each other. And it was visible, you could actually see it. I remember one occasion I was being packed off to school in South Wales, mid-Wales, and they came to see me off at the railway station. And as the train pulled out; it was a weird experience, rather like one of those ancient Greek mythological experiences; I looked back and saw Jack and my mother standing in a glow of their own making. And it was a glow not only of great love and affection, a visible aura, but also had a tinge of doom about it. And I wept all the way from Oxford to South Wales, I couldn’t stop. The doom coming from the fact that she was to die. It was evident to me at that, at that time that my mother was soon going to die. This was after they had lived together as husband and wife for three years. And she did die while I was at that school, within a year.

Gresham’s cancer returned in early in 1960 and she died on July 13 at the age of 45. Lewis cared for her two sons until they reached adulthood.

He wrote a book about his suffering during his wife’s illness and after her death called A Grief Observed, it was so raw and personal that Lewis originally released it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. So many friends recommended the book to Lewis as a method for dealing with his own grief that he eventually made his authorship public

In 1961 Lewis became unwell and had to resign his position at Cambridge. He died at home, one week before his 65th birthday on Friday, November 22; the same day on which President Kennedy was assassinated.

Media coverage of his death was almost completely overshadowed by news of the assassination of President Kennedy.

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