C.S. Lewis

(1898 - 1963)

Clive Staples Lewis, known to his friends as Jack, was born in Belfast in 1898, received a shell wound while fighting in France in 1918, and began a tutorial fellowship in English at Oxford University in 1925. A scholar of medieval and Renaissance English literature, he later befriended professor J.R.R. Tolkien, and the two became prominent members of an intellectual group called the Inklings. Lewis published The Screwtape Letters in 1942 and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950. He died from heart failure on November 22, 1963, the same day as Aldous Huxley and U.S. president John F. Kennedy.