cover image Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life

Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life

William Griffin. HarperCollins Publishers, $24.95 (507pp) ISBN 978-0-06-250352-7

C. S. Lewis (18981963), probably best known for The Screwtape Letters, The Allegory of Love and his children's classic, the Narnia series, was many things: Medieval and Renaissance scholar, novelist, poet, mythologist, satirist, teacher, broadcaster, Christian apologist and one of the influential minds of our time. In this stimulating and imaginative narrative biography, author-playwright Griffin brings before us the man himself, as often as possible via his own words, throughout his long and energetic career at Oxford and Cambridge, particularly in his relations with friends, family, students, critics, editors, thus vividly revealing the warm personality of this keen logician with puckish humor (he once settled a dispute with a student by the sword). There are drawbacks to the method: one doesn't learn the grounds of Lewis's differences with Eliot, for example, or his close friend Tolkien, norfeel the full weight of his mind.(October)