C. S. Lewis: A Biography

by A. N. Wilson

Overview

This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the brilliant, prolific writer, C. S. Lewis.C. S. Lewis was a deeply complex man, capable of inspiring both great devotion and great hostility. This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the clever child from the ‘Little End Room’ of his Ulster childhood and adult life, exploring Lewis’s unwilling conversion to Christianity, the genesis of his writing, and the web of his relationships.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780007378883
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	07/18/2013
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	842,253
File size:	487 KB

About the Author

A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. He was a lecturer at St Hugh’s College and New College from 1976 to 1981, and was then appointed Literary Editor of the Spectator. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981. His novels include The Sweets of Pimlico, The Healing Art, Wise Virgin and biographies of Walter Scott, Milton and Tolstoy.

Editorial Reviews

I know of no modern biographer who equals Wilson's delicacy of touch and sensitivity to human quandaries. An astonishing book.

Leon Edel

The mixture presented in Wilson's biography of the life of learning...of domestic drama and bad temper, religion, and sex, is irresistible.

New York Review of Books

One might see the life of Christian apologist Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) as a Freudian case history. As an Oxford undergrad, he took up with Janie Moore, 25 years his senior, whom he passed off as his ``adopted mother''; she filled a gap left by the death of his mother when he was nine. When Moore, his companion for over 30 years, died, Lewis married Joy Davidman, an aspiring poet-novelist dying of cancer who had two small sons--her circumstances parallel to those of Lewis's own mother. Wilson ( Tolstoy ), though attuned to psychoanalytic theory, avoids reductionist psychobiography in this absorbing, intimate portrait of a secretive figure. He presents Lewis as a Romantic egoist in the tradition of Wordsworth and Yeats, as a seeker who transformed his obsession with childhood memories into moral fables for our age. Primary sources yield fresh insights into Lewis's Oxford circle, the Inklings, and particularly into his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien. Photos. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly