One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Clive Staples Lewis, or C.S. Lewis, has become a household name. With such works as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity, his works remain highly influential among writers and creatives, since the publication of his earliest works in the 1930s.

Lewis was inspired at an early age to dream beyond the reality of daily life and developed a love of books and knowledge. His parents, Albert Lewis and Florence Hamilton Lewis, were avid readers and his mother graduated from modern day Queen’s University Belfast when it was not common for women to do so. Lewis’ college career began at Campbell College Belfast which he ultimately left for the University of Oxford where he was accepted into University College to study Classics. Before beginning his studies, Lewis served in World War I, as did fellow writer J.R.R. Tolkien, who would later become one of his closest friends.

 

 

Although The Chronicles of Narnia remains Lewis’ most famous series, his first published work was The Space Trilogy: a sci-fi series published between 1938 to 1946. The set featured above includes Lewis’ brother’s, Warren Hamilton Lewis’s inscribed copy of the first novel in the series, Out of the Silent Planet. The Lewis brothers were very close and C.S. Lewis referred to his brother as, “my dearest and closest friend.” Mr. Hamilton Lewis was a historian in his own right and became his brother’s secretary in their later years. Their bond of brotherly love was very strong, despite the tribulations endured in their early life, including their mother’s death.

 

 

After graduating from Oxford, Lewis took a position at Magdalen College in Oxford as a tutor, which he kept for a good portion of his life (1925 to 1954). During this time, Lewis wrote many books and scholarly articles. Some being The Space Trilogy (as mentioned before), some of the first books in The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, and The Allegory of Love  (shown above). At this time, a group of Lewis’ fellow critics and writers at Oxford, who came to be known as the Inklings, became instrumental in Lewis’ editing and publishing process, some of the most notable Inklings being J.R.R. Tolkien, Warren Hamilton Lewis, and Charles Williams. J.R.R. Tolkien is also notably known to have been an influence on Lewis’ conversion to the Christian faith, the subject of much of his later work.

 

 

Lewis’ most popular and influential work, The Chronicles of Narnia has established itself as one of the best fantasy series of the 20th century and has been adapted into multiple films. Lewis began writing this series during his time at Oxford, beginning with The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe which has since become his most famous book. Lewis took inspiration from his surroundings, such as a lamp post on the Oxford campus which stands next to an ornate door with a lion carving, striking a suspicious resemblance to Aslan, a recurring character in the series. The final book of this series, The Last Battle, was published following Lewis’ departure from Oxford and two years into his tenure as a professor at Cambridge University.

 

 

During his time as the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, C.S. Lewis became a supervisor for PhD student Anthony Colin Spearing. Lewis did not mentor many students at Cambridge, making the above collection of correspondence between him and his student an exceptional rarity. In it, Spearing acknowledges how incredible it was to have Lewis as a supervisor and describes his methods and feedback as, “extremely conscientious in commenting in detail on anything I submitted to him, and he most kindly went on doing that after I had ceased to be his supervisor…” Lewis served as a professor at Cambridge University from 1954 until his death in 1963.

 

 

C.S. Lewis was a literary giant of the 20th century. His books have been established as classics of the modern age. His final work, Till We Have Faces, continues to marvel literary critics to this day.

In addition to these wonderful works of fiction, our collection currently contains several other first editions of C.S. Lewis’ writings including The Abolition of Man, Reflections on the Psalms, and many others. View the complete collection here.