Writings

From the moment C.S. Lewis becomes a pupil of William Kirkpatrick (1848–1921) in September 1914, his ambition is to be a poet. From that time onwards, he spends much of his holidays writing poetry. When at Keble College in Oxford for his officer training in the summer of 1917, he turns in his spare time to poetry. During his time at the front in France, he carries a notebook in his pocket, and he manages to write a number of poems about his experiences in the trenches. After being wounded on his left arm and leg by shrapnel on 15 April 1918, Lewis continues writing his ‘war poems’ when at the hospital in London in May 1918, and later at several other army hospitals. During his rehabilitation at Ashton Court, Lewis’s collection of poems takes shape. His poems are both pessimistic and hopeful and rationalistic and romantic. According to Lewis himself, the poems string around the idea that nature is wholly diabolic and malevolent and that God, if He exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangement. Lewis combines these poems with others he has written before and sends them to publisher William Heinemann in London, who accepts them for publication. On 20 March 1919, when he is twenty years old, C.S. Lewis’s first book, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics, is published. It is published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton, Lewis’s first name and his mother’s family name.

On 20 September 1926, C.S. Lewis publishes his narrative poem Dymer. It is based on a myth he found in his mind somewhere about his seventeenth year. The poem is about a man who conceives a monster on a mysterious beast, and once the monster has killed its father, it becomes a god. Lewis works on Dymer for nearly ten years. He begins writing a prose version of the story during Christmas 1916 under the title The Redemption of Ask, but this version did not survive. During his recovery from being wounded in the Battle of Arras in France in April 1918, new ideas cause Lewis to revise Dymer. In December 1918, he begins a verse version of the story, which also did not survive. In April 1922, Lewis starts a narrative poem on Dymer. The poem undergoes numerous revisions in the years 1922–26, but the story does not change. In the early days of his fellowship at Magdalen College in Oxford, Lewis completes his long narrative poem. Dymer is published on 20 September 1926 under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton, Lewis’s first name and his mother’s family name. Although he is still a declared atheist then, Dymer shows Lewis is concerned with salvation. The publication of Dymer seems to mark the acceptance of a belief in a not further defined power outside himself. Dymer is reprinted in October 1950, and in October 1969, this edition is reprinted in Narrative Poems, edited by Walter Hooper.

C.S. Lewis tells about his conversion to Christianity in his book The Pilgrim’s Regress. An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, published in May 1933. It is an allusion to the book The Pilgrim’s Progress by the English preacher John Bunyan (1628–1688). Lewis writes his book during a two-week holiday in Ireland in August 1932. It is his first work of prose in an allegory style. The story is an allegorical account of Lewis’s return to God and the church after all the experiences, temptations, and philosophies he encountered in his life. Lewis explains the elusive experience he calls ‘Joy’ and its role in his conversion. He tells about his search for Joy, for what is spiritually highest, and of the temptations of all the false joy he has met on his journey. Lewis realises that his experiences of longing for Joy had all along been surges of spiritual homesickness for heaven and longing for God.

As a fellow in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College in Oxford, C.S. Lewis publishes several scholarly works. In 1925, Lewis’s former tutor, Frank Perry Wilson (1889–1963), suggests that he writes a book on certain aspects of medieval thought. Lewis starts writing in 1927 and works intensively on it between 1933 and 1935. In this work of literary criticism and history, he makes little-known medieval literature significant. The book is published in May 1936 as The Allegory of Love. A Study in Medieval Tradition.

As a child, C.S. Lewis enjoys reading what we now call science fiction books. When he is eleven years old, he and his brother Warren are given a telescope, which opens up a lifetime interest in the heavenly bodies. In the late 1930s, Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien believe that science fiction should be written from a Christian point of view. Therefore, Lewis writes three space-travel novels about the Cambridge college teacher Dr Elwin Ransom. The first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, is published in September 1938. With this story, Lewis goes against scientism, the belief that the scientific method is the best or only way to render truth about our world and reality. After the publication of Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis realises that he can evangelise through popular books in which Christianity is only implicit. In April 1943, he publishes his second novel, Perelandra. Against the background of the biblical Genesis and John Milton’s book Paradise Lost, Lewis re-imagines the story of the Fall of Man and gives the story of Paradise retained. In August 1945, Lewis finally publishes his third novel, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. The story reflects Lewis’s conviction that if scientists ever succeed in their purpose to dominate nature, man will be abolished.

As a fellow in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College in Oxford, C.S. Lewis publishes several scholarly works. In March 1939, he publishes a collection of essays on literary and linguistic subjects, with some interesting reflections on the curriculum of the Oxford English School under the title Rehabilitations. And other essays. This collection includes the following pieces:

• Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot
• William Morris
• The Idea of an ‘English School’ (paper for a joint meeting of the Classical and English Associations at Oxford)
• Our English Syllabus (address to a group of Oxford undergraduates)
• High and Low Brows (address to the English Society at Oxford in the 1930s)
• The Alliterative Metre (first published in Lysistrata, Vol. 2, May 1935)
• Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare (address at Manchester University in the 1930s)
• Variation in Shakespeare and Others
• Christianity and Literature (delivered at the invitation of a religious society in Oxford in the late 1930s)

In April 1939, C.S. Lewis publishes the book The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. It offers six essays on literary criticism between Lewis and Eustace Tillyard (1889–1962), a fellow in English at Jesus College in Oxford. On 13 May 1929, Lewis reads a paper on ‘The Personal Heresy’ at the Michaelmas Club, an undergraduate discussion group whose members read papers on philosophy and literature. In his paper, Lewis discusses what he considers the mistaken view that all poetry expresses the poet’s personality. According to Lewis, all criticism should be of books, not of authors. The critic’s role is neither to reconstruct the poet’s psyche between the poem’s lines nor to deconstruct the poem as a concealed biography. The critic’s role is to help the reader see with even greater clarity the world depicted in and through the poem that the poet has intentionally composed. With this, Lewis opposes Tillyard, who believes that poetry is first and foremost the expression of the poet’s personality and shows the author’s state of mind when writing. Lewis’s paper becomes the basis of a debate with Tillyard in a series of articles published in the Essays and Studies journal, a periodical of the English Association, between 1934 and 1937. Eventually, they are collected and published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy in 1939.

After the publication of his books The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1933 and Out of the Silent Planet in 1938, C.S. Lewis is invited by the Centenary Press in London to write a book on pain for their ‘Christian Challenge’ series. The series aims to introduce the Christian faith to people outside the church. Lewis accepts the invitation, and during the first months of the Second World War (1939–1945), he starts writing his first book of Christian apologetics, The Problem of Pain. As Lewis writes the book, he reads it in instalments to the Inklings, to whom he dedicates it. The book, published in October 1940, is an example of faith seeking understanding. It is Lewis’s reply to the argument that all the suffering in the world is inconsistent with, or evidence against, an omnipotent and perfectly loving God. In the book, Lewis tries to assume what is professed by all baptised and communicating Christians. For Lewis, when all is said about the divisions of Christianity, there remains an enormous common ground. He sees it as his task to tell the outside world what all Christians believe. Lewis writes in plain, ordinary language to re-state ancient and orthodox doctrines. He succeeds, and his book The Problem of Pain becomes an immediate bestseller. It is the beginning of his fame as a Christian apologist.

On Sunday 21 July 1940, at Holy Trinity Church in Oxford, C.S. Lewis dreams up the concept and outline for The Screwtape Letters. He is struck by an idea for a book that consists of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work. The idea is to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view, the perspective of hell. Lewis starts writing, and beginning on 2 May 1941, the letters appear first in thirty-one weekly instalments in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian. Then, they are published as a book in February 1942. The book consists of letters written by a senior devil, Screwtape, to Wormwood, a younger devil whose job is to steer people away from God. The book is an instant success. It is reprinted multiple times and published in the United States the following year.

Due to his increasing fame as a Christian writer and apologist following the publication of his book The Problem of Pain in October 1940, C.S. Lewis is asked by the director of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Religious Department in February 1941 to give a series of fifteen-minute talks on the BBC. Lewis agrees, and every Wednesday in August, he goes to London to give four live talks on natural law as an implicit background to the Christian Scriptures. The series, entitled ‘Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe’, is a great success. On 6 September, Lewis returns to the microphone to give a talk to answer some listeners’ questions. His radio talks prove so successful that he is persuaded to return for three more series. In January and February 1942, Lewis gives five talks, under the title ‘What Christians Believe’, on what all Christians, regardless of denomination, believe. In July 1942, the two series of radio talks are published in one volume as Broadcast Talks, and it immediately becomes a bestseller.

Since the 1930s, C.S. Lewis has been developing an original approach to the epic poem Paradise Lost by the English poet John Milton (1608–1674). It involves both an exposition of its theology and an explication of the poem’s style and form. Lewis reads Paradise Lost for the first time when nine years old. A deep and abiding love for Milton begins during 1914–1917 when he is a pupil of William Kirkpatrick (1848–1921). As a fellow of Magdalen College in Oxford, Lewis lectures in the English School primarily about medieval and Renaissance literature. Still, Milton remains one of his favourite poets, and he gives some lectures on him. In March 1941, Lewis is invited by the University College of North Wales in Bangor to deliver that year’s Ballard Mathews Lectures. On the successive evenings of 1–3 December 1941, he gives three lectures on Milton’s Paradise Lost. In October 1942, the revised and expanded lectures are published as the book A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’.

In 1942, C.S. Lewis studies the ethics of religions other than Christianity. He also investigates the secular ethics of various philosophical systems. His students make him aware that school textbooks assume and take for granted the subjective nature of all literary and moral values. Lewis is appalled and devotes three Ridell Memorial Lectures at Durham University to this. On the successive evenings of 24–26 February 1943, he argues for the objectivity of values and the natural law. Lewis’s lectures reflect his conviction that if scientists ever succeed in their purpose to dominate nature, man will be abolished. According to Lewis, an honest study of different cultures indicates the existence of an objective universal moral law that transcends time and culture, which he calls The Tao, a concept he derives from East Asian philosophy. For Lewis, those who deny the validity of moral judgments are usually self-contradictory because they cannot escape making moral judgments themselves. When people no longer believe in any objective truth, there is no constraint on what they might do to reshape society in their own image. This mentality is the wellspring of tyranny. In January 1943, Lewis’s lectures are published as The Abolition of Man, or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. The book is not well received at first, but over time it proves to be a prophetic work, for the moral subjectivism that Lewis predicts has come to pass with a vengeance in the Western world.

Due to his increasing fame as a Christian writer and apologist following the publication of his book The Problem of Pain in October 1940, C.S. Lewis is asked by the director of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Religious Department in February 1941 to give a series of fifteen-minute talks on the BBC. Lewis agrees, and every Wednesday in August, he goes to London to give four live talks on natural law as an implicit background to the Christian Scriptures. The series, entitled ‘Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe’, is a great success. On 6 September, Lewis returns to the microphone to give a talk to answer some listeners’ questions. His radio talks prove so successful that he is persuaded to return for three more series. In January and February 1942, Lewis gives five talks, under the title ‘What Christians Believe’, on what all Christians, regardless of denomination, believe. In July 1942, the two series of radio talks are published in one volume as Broadcast Talks, and it immediately becomes a bestseller.

Following the success of the previous broadcasts, C.S. Lewis gives eight radio talks on Christian behaviour from September to November 1942. He devotes most of his time to the Christian virtues of faith, hope, charity, and forgiveness. Lewis gives positive and practical advice grounded in his own life experience. In April 1943, the series is published in the book Christian Behaviour. A Further Series of Broadcast Talks.

As a child, C.S. Lewis enjoys reading what we now call science fiction books. When he is eleven years old, he and his brother Warren are given a telescope, which opens up a lifetime interest in the heavenly bodies. In the late 1930s, Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien believe that science fiction should be written from a Christian point of view. Therefore, Lewis writes three space-travel novels about the Cambridge college teacher Dr Elwin Ransom. The first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, is published in September 1938. With this story, Lewis goes against scientism, the belief that the scientific method is the best or only way to render truth about our world and reality. After the publication of Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis realises that he can evangelise through popular books in which Christianity is only implicit. In April 1943, he publishes his second novel, Perelandra. Against the background of the biblical Genesis and John Milton’s book Paradise Lost, Lewis re-imagines the story of the Fall of Man and gives the story of Paradise retained. In August 1945, Lewis finally publishes his third novel, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. The story reflects Lewis’s conviction that if scientists ever succeed in their purpose to dominate nature, man will be abolished.

Due to his increasing fame as a Christian writer and apologist following the publication of his book The Problem of Pain in October 1940, C.S. Lewis is asked by the director of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Religious Department in February 1941 to give a series of fifteen-minute talks on the BBC. Lewis agrees, and every Wednesday in August, he goes to London to give four live talks on natural law as an implicit background to the Christian Scriptures. The series, entitled ‘Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe’, is a great success. On 6 September, Lewis returns to the microphone to give a talk to answer some listeners’ questions. His radio talks prove so successful that he is persuaded to return for three more series. In January and February 1942, Lewis gives five talks, under the title ‘What Christians Believe’, on what all Christians, regardless of denomination, believe. In July 1942, the two series of radio talks are published in one volume as Broadcast Talks, and it immediately becomes a bestseller.

Following the success of the previous broadcasts, C.S. Lewis gives eight radio talks on Christian behaviour from September to November 1942. He devotes most of his time to the Christian virtues of faith, hope, charity, and forgiveness. Lewis gives positive and practical advice grounded in his own life experience. In April 1943, the series is published in the book Christian Behaviour. A Further Series of Broadcast Talks.

From February to April 1944, C.S. Lewis gives his final series of seven recorded radio talks, entitled ‘Beyond Personality: The Christian View of God’. Only talk seven of the series has survived in the archives of the BBC. Lewis’s last series appears in The Listener, the BBC’s own periodical, and is published in weekly instalments between 24 February and 6 April. In October 1944, the talks are published as Beyond Personality. The Christian Idea of God. Finally, the four series of radio talks are combined into a single volume and published in July 1952 as Mere Christianity, a title Lewis borrows from the English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter (1615–1691).

As a child, C.S. Lewis enjoys reading what we now call science fiction books. When he is eleven years old, he and his brother Warren are given a telescope, which opens up a lifetime interest in the heavenly bodies. In the late 1930s, Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien believe that science fiction should be written from a Christian point of view. Therefore, Lewis writes three space-travel novels about the Cambridge college teacher Dr Elwin Ransom. The first novel, Out of the Silent Planet, is published in September 1938. With this story, Lewis goes against scientism, the belief that the scientific method is the best or only way to render truth about our world and reality. After the publication of Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis realises that he can evangelise through popular books in which Christianity is only implicit. In April 1943, he publishes his second novel, Perelandra. Against the background of the biblical Genesis and John Milton’s book Paradise Lost, Lewis re-imagines the story of the Fall of Man and gives the story of Paradise retained. In August 1945, Lewis finally publishes his third novel, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. The story reflects Lewis’s conviction that if scientists ever succeed in their purpose to dominate nature, man will be abolished.

Around August 1931, C.S. Lewis encounters an old idea of the refrigerium: the idea that the perishing souls in hell may sometimes have remission and refreshment. An idea for a religious book about a holiday from hell arises in Lewis. It first appears in fourteen instalments in the Church of England weekly newspaper, The Guardian, from 10 November 1944 to 13 April 1945. In November, it is published as The Great Divorce. The book is a dream vision about some residents of hell going on holiday to heaven. If they prefer heaven over hell, they are free to remain, but on the condition that they give up some vice that hinders them from experiencing real joy. However, nearly none of them decide to stay because they have to give up too much. According to Lewis, any natural impulse, no matter how virtuous, becomes destructive if regarded as the sole absolute. Pride is the most deadly of the sins because it locks the sinner into an attitude of refusal of the joys of heaven. For Lewis, there are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’ and those to whom God says, ‘thy will be done’. Without that self-choice, there can be no hell. No one who earnestly and constantly longs for joy will ever miss it. It is between those who do and those who do not, and between heaven and hell, that the great divorce exists.

Between 19 September 1914 and 26 April 1917, C.S. Lewis studies privately with Kirkpatrick, called ‘The Great Knock’. These years allow him to discover something about himself, without the pressure and expectations of an institution and peers. Under Kirkpatrick, Lewis improves his Greek and Latin, and learns French, Italian, and German. But he leads a double life. On the one hand, he masters and employs the logical, rationalistic methods of Kirkpatrick in his studies. At the same time, he is intensely romantic and imaginative. Kirkpatrick’s atheism influences Lewis, and his own begins to take shape. He carefully keeps it hidden from Father Albert, and on 6 December 1914, he is confirmed at St Mark’s Church in Belfast. Remarkably, in March 1916, Lewis experiences the reading of the religious book Phantastes by the Scottish poet, preacher, and writer George MacDonald (1824–1905) as a great literary experience. He appreciates the beauty of MacDonald’s writing, his symbolism, and how MacDonald sees divinity in ordinary things. Later, Lewis calls this ‘holiness’. From MacDonald, he learns many major themes that become central to his own thinking and writing. In 1946, Lewis edits George MacDonald. An Anthology, a book with 365 brief quotations gleaned from the religious writings of MacDonald.

On Thursday 26 November 1942, C.S. Lewis preaches a sermon on miracles at the Church of St Jude on the Hill in London. In the summer of 1943, he begins to write a book on miracles. It is published in May 1947 as Miracles: A Preliminary Study. In this book of Christian apologetics, Lewis deals with the fact that many people reject the Gospels because they cannot accept the miracles in them. For Lewis, this is mainly a result of the rise of modern science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which increasingly saw the world as a closed system subject to the laws of nature. Therefore, we shall not regard experiences as miracles if we already hold a belief that excludes the supernatural. So, Lewis knows from the beginning that a defence of the miracles recorded in the New Testament has to begin with a philosophical attack on unbelief. In his book, Lewis notes that Christianity differs from many of the world’s major religions in that miraculous elements are essential to its very nature. Christianity is the story of a great miracle. To Lewis, that is the Incarnation, God becoming man. Every other miracle prepares for, exhibits, or results from this.

C.S. Lewis’s argument for the possibility of miracles is based on the distinction he makes between naturalism and supernaturalism. According to Lewis, reason cannot explain itself within naturalism and, therefore, requires a supernatural reality. This constitutes the basis for his proof of God’s existence, which he elaborates further in the third chapter of Miracles. However, the prevailing philosophy at Oxford in the 1940s differs from that of the 1920s, when Lewis was a student. At a meeting of the Socratic Club on 2 February 1948, Elizabeth Anscombe (1919 –2001), a research fellow at Somerville College and later Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University, reads a paper criticizing Lewis’s argument that naturalism is self-refuting, as he elaborates in Miracles. Lewis replies to this criticism of his book, and a tremendous debate follows. Afterwards, Lewis feels defeated and thinks that his proof of the existence of God is destroyed. However, he recovers and revises the third chapter of Miracles before it is reissued in May 1960.

In December 1947, the Inklings publish Essays Presented to Charles Williams, a collection of six essays by friends of Williams, and a Memoir by C.S. Lewis, in honour of Williams’s death in 1945. Charles Williams (1886–1945) is a poet, novelist, and editor at the London office of Oxford University Press. When the Second World War causes the evacuation of the press to Oxford, Lewis and Williams meet regularly from September 1939 to May 1945. They share a passion for the poetry of John Milton (1608–1674) and William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850). Lewis is captivated by Williams’s talk and excited by his imaginative speculation and wide-ranging and encompassing ideas in Romantic theology, transforming earthly delights into a Christian vision. Lewis loves Williams’s poems on the legend of the British King Arthur and works on a study of them. It becomes a memorial as Williams dies unexpectedly in May 1945. Lewis is deeply grieved by Williams’s death, but it strengthens his faith. In 1948, the book Arthurian Torso is published. It is a posthumous fragment of the figure of King Arthur by Charles Williams and a commentary on his Arthurian poems by C.S. Lewis.

Published as The Weight of Glory in the U.S.A. in 1949. This collection of essays includes the following pieces:

• Transposition (Pentecost sermon at Mansfield College, Oxford on 28 May 1944)
• The Weight of Glory (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 8 June 1941)
• Membership (address to the Society of St Alban & St Sergius, Oxford on 10 February 1945)
• Learning in War-Time (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 22 October 1939)
• The Inner Ring (delivered as a ‘Commemoration Oration’ at King’s College, University of London on 14 December 1944)

The Chronicles of Narnia are a series of seven children’s books, which C.S. Lewis starts in 1948 and completes in 1954. Shortly before Britain declares war on Germany in September 1939, many children are evacuated from London to Oxford, and some are housed at The Kilns. Lewis enjoys the children, and it seems that the presence of some of them makes him write The Chronicles of Narnia. In six years, the following seven volumes are published:

1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
1951 Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
1952 The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
1953 The Silver Chair
1954 The Horse and His Boy
1955 The Magician’s Nephew
1956 The Last Battle

According to Lewis, the series is not planned beforehand. The stories all begin with pictures in his head. They are not allegories but supposals. For Lewis, the lion Aslan is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question: what might Jesus Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate, die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?

The Chronicles of Narnia are a series of seven children’s books, which C.S. Lewis starts in 1948 and completes in 1954. Shortly before Britain declares war on Germany in September 1939, many children are evacuated from London to Oxford, and some are housed at The Kilns. Lewis enjoys the children, and it seems that the presence of some of them makes him write The Chronicles of Narnia. In six years, the following seven volumes are published:

1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
1951 Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
1952 The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
1953 The Silver Chair
1954 The Horse and His Boy
1955 The Magician’s Nephew
1956 The Last Battle

According to Lewis, the series is not planned beforehand. The stories all begin with pictures in his head. They are not allegories but supposals. For Lewis, the lion Aslan is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question: what might Jesus Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate, die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?

Due to his increasing fame as a Christian writer and apologist following the publication of his book The Problem of Pain in October 1940, C.S. Lewis is asked by the director of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Religious Department in February 1941 to give a series of fifteen-minute talks on the BBC. Lewis agrees, and every Wednesday in August, he goes to London to give four live talks on natural law as an implicit background to the Christian Scriptures. The series, entitled ‘Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe’, is a great success. On 6 September, Lewis returns to the microphone to give a talk to answer some listeners’ questions. His radio talks prove so successful that he is persuaded to return for three more series. In January and February 1942, Lewis gives five talks, under the title ‘What Christians Believe’, on what all Christians, regardless of denomination, believe. In July 1942, the two series of radio talks are published in one volume as Broadcast Talks, and it immediately becomes a bestseller.

Following the success of the previous broadcasts, C.S. Lewis gives eight radio talks on Christian behaviour from September to November 1942. He devotes most of his time to the Christian virtues of faith, hope, charity, and forgiveness. Lewis gives positive and practical advice grounded in his own life experience. In April 1943, the series is published in the book Christian Behaviour. A Further Series of Broadcast Talks.

From February to April 1944, C.S. Lewis gives his final series of seven recorded radio talks, entitled ‘Beyond Personality: The Christian View of God’. Only talk seven of the series has survived in the archives of the BBC. Lewis’s last series appears in The Listener, the BBC’s own periodical, and is published in weekly instalments between 24 February and 6 April. In October 1944, the talks are published as Beyond Personality. The Christian Idea of God. Finally, the four series of radio talks are combined into a single volume and published in July 1952 as Mere Christianity, a title Lewis borrows from the English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter (1615–1691).

The Chronicles of Narnia are a series of seven children’s books, which C.S. Lewis starts in 1948 and completes in 1954. Shortly before Britain declares war on Germany in September 1939, many children are evacuated from London to Oxford, and some are housed at The Kilns. Lewis enjoys the children, and it seems that the presence of some of them makes him write The Chronicles of Narnia. In six years, the following seven volumes are published:

1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
1951 Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
1952 The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
1953 The Silver Chair
1954 The Horse and His Boy
1955 The Magician’s Nephew
1956 The Last Battle

According to Lewis, the series is not planned beforehand. The stories all begin with pictures in his head. They are not allegories but supposals. For Lewis, the lion Aslan is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question: what might Jesus Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate, die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?

The Chronicles of Narnia are a series of seven children’s books, which C.S. Lewis starts in 1948 and completes in 1954. Shortly before Britain declares war on Germany in September 1939, many children are evacuated from London to Oxford, and some are housed at The Kilns. Lewis enjoys the children, and it seems that the presence of some of them makes him write The Chronicles of Narnia. In six years, the following seven volumes are published:

1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
1951 Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
1952 The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
1953 The Silver Chair
1954 The Horse and His Boy
1955 The Magician’s Nephew
1956 The Last Battle

According to Lewis, the series is not planned beforehand. The stories all begin with pictures in his head. They are not allegories but supposals. For Lewis, the lion Aslan is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question: what might Jesus Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate, die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?

The Chronicles of Narnia are a series of seven children’s books, which C.S. Lewis starts in 1948 and completes in 1954. Shortly before Britain declares war on Germany in September 1939, many children are evacuated from London to Oxford, and some are housed at The Kilns. Lewis enjoys the children, and it seems that the presence of some of them makes him write The Chronicles of Narnia. In six years, the following seven volumes are published:

1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
1951 Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
1952 The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
1953 The Silver Chair
1954 The Horse and His Boy
1955 The Magician’s Nephew
1956 The Last Battle

According to Lewis, the series is not planned beforehand. The stories all begin with pictures in his head. They are not allegories but supposals. For Lewis, the lion Aslan is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question: what might Jesus Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate, die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?

In 1951, Magdalen College in Oxford gives C.S. Lewis a year off from college duties to complete his most ambitious scholarly work: a history of English literature from the sixteenth century. In 1935, the delegates of Oxford University Press conceive the idea of the Oxford History of English Literature. It is considered a series of twelve volumes, each of which will be a single author’s work. In June 1935, Lewis is asked to write Volume 3 on the sixteenth century and agrees. A lot of the reading work for the book Lewis does in the Duke Humphrey’s reading room of Bodleian Library. He writes much of the book by the time he gives The Clark Lectures in April and May 1944. Lewis then delivers four lectures entitled ‘Studies in Sixteenth-Century Literature’ at Trinity College in Cambridge. In 1952, the first draft of Lewis’s book is completed. Revisions, bibliography, and chronological tables take another year. In September 1954, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, is published. In 1990, several of the names of the original works in the series are changed. Lewis’s volume is given the new title Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century.

The Chronicles of Narnia are a series of seven children’s books, which C.S. Lewis starts in 1948 and completes in 1954. Shortly before Britain declares war on Germany in September 1939, many children are evacuated from London to Oxford, and some are housed at The Kilns. Lewis enjoys the children, and it seems that the presence of some of them makes him write The Chronicles of Narnia. In six years, the following seven volumes are published:

1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
1951 Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
1952 The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
1953 The Silver Chair
1954 The Horse and His Boy
1955 The Magician’s Nephew
1956 The Last Battle

According to Lewis, the series is not planned beforehand. The stories all begin with pictures in his head. They are not allegories but supposals. For Lewis, the lion Aslan is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question: what might Jesus Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate, die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?

In September 1955, C.S. Lewis publishes the book Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. He has been working on it since 1948. It has taken so long to write because the pattern of his life becomes clearer as he reflects on it over time. The book is not a general autobiography, but Lewis tries to tell the story of his conversion to Christianity. In that story, his earlier years are more important than his later life. In the book, Lewis describes how he is surprised by Joy, and through it by God. The book should be read for the light it throws on the nature of Joy and the role it played in Lewis’s conversion and life.

The Chronicles of Narnia are a series of seven children’s books, which C.S. Lewis starts in 1948 and completes in 1954. Shortly before Britain declares war on Germany in September 1939, many children are evacuated from London to Oxford, and some are housed at The Kilns. Lewis enjoys the children, and it seems that the presence of some of them makes him write The Chronicles of Narnia. In six years, the following seven volumes are published:

1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
1951 Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
1952 The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”
1953 The Silver Chair
1954 The Horse and His Boy
1955 The Magician’s Nephew
1956 The Last Battle

According to Lewis, the series is not planned beforehand. The stories all begin with pictures in his head. They are not allegories but supposals. For Lewis, the lion Aslan is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question: what might Jesus Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate, die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?

In September 1956, C.S. Lewis publishes Till We Have Faces. A Myth Retold. This book is his last work of fiction and is dedicated to his wife Joy. It is Lewis’s final attempt to retell the classical Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, as found in the Metamorphoses of the Numidian writer and philosopher Apuleius (125–170). Lewis struggles with it from the time he is a student at Oxford University during the 1920s. His first attempt is to retell the story in verse. In the spring of 1955, Lewis understands, with the help of Joy, what he wants to say, and the final version is written in prose. After discussing the book with Joy as it is being written, she edits and types it. In retelling the story, Lewis introduces a new character as the narrator: Orual, the queen of Glome and the ugly sister of Psyche. Although she is passionate and longs to love and to be loved, her jealousy and possessiveness preclude it. The book tells the story of how she is redeemed.

Following his conversion to a belief in God in June 1930, C.S. Lewis begins to attend Holy Trinity Church and the daily services at the chapel of Magdalen College in Oxford. By constantly reading and praying the Psalms on his own and through the offices of the Morning and Evening Prayer, Lewis knows the Psalms almost by heart. Because he doesn’t read Hebrew, the original language in which the Psalms are written, Lewis uses the translation of the Psalms found in the Book of Common Prayer. At the suggestion of his friend, the philosopher and theologian Austin Farrer (1904–1968), Lewis writes a book on the Psalms. Joy strongly supports him and offers to edit and type the manuscript. They discuss much of the book’s content during the summer vacation of 1957. According to Lewis, the book is not a work of scholarship, but he writes as an amateur to another, discussing the difficulties he has encountered or the insights he has gained while reading the Psalms. He hopes that this might interest and sometimes even help other inexpert readers. The book Reflections on the Psalms is published in September 1958. Shortly afterwards, Lewis receives a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher (1887–1972), inviting him to join the Commission to Revise the Psalter, as it appears in the Book of Common Prayer.

Published under this title in the U.S.A. in February 1960. The collection of essays includes the following pieces:

• The Efficacy of Prayer (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1959)
• On Obstinacy in Belief (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 30 April 1953)
• Lilies That Fester (first published in Twentieth Century, Vol. 157, April 1955)
• Screwtape Proposes a Toast (first published in The Saturday Evening Post, 19 December 1959)
• Good Work and Good Works (first published in The Catholic Art Quarterly, Vol. 23, Christmas 1959)
• Religion and Rocketry (first published as ‘Will We Lose God in Outer Space?’, in Christian Herald, Vol. 81, April 1958)
• The World’s Last Night (first published as ‘Christian Hope – Its meaning for today’ in Religion in Life, Vol. 21, winter 1951–1952)

In January 1958, C.S. Lewis receives a request from the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation of Atlanta to make some tape recordings to be played over the air. After discussions with his wife Joy, Lewis agrees. He decides to talk about Christian ethics using the four Greek words storge, philia, eros, and agape, meaning affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Lewis finishes the scripts in the summer of 1958, which are recorded on 19–20 August in London. An hour is devoted to each of the four kinds of love. The recordings are later heard over various radio stations in the United States. In his talks, Lewis distinguishes between gift love and need love. God is pure gift love, and our being is one vast need in relation to God. Whether as gift-love or need-love, every natural love left to itself cannot be what it naturally seeks to be. Lewis characterises each of the four loves, exhibiting features that offer at least a mirror of divine love. He then notes the dangers inherent in natural love’s insufficiency that usually manifest themselves when love is at its best. He suggests that something more is needed for love to be itself truly. Lewis retains the rights to turn the recordings into a book, which he does by midsummer 1959. In March 1960, it is published as The Four Loves.

In September 1960, C.S. Lewis publishes Studies in Words. In this scholarly work, based on a series of lectures he delivered as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University in 1956, Lewis provides a linguistic study of seven words: nature, sad, wit, free, sense, simple, conscious, and conscience. For each word, Lewis considers its Latin basis and studies how branches of meanings have extended from the main trunk of its earliest form. A key reason for doing this is to warn readers against falling into the trap of reading medieval and Renaissance words as though they primarily carry the same meaning as today. According to Lewis, the chief danger will not occur when a word’s meaning has obviously changed. The more fundamental problem occurs when the contemporary meaning is close enough to fit, misleading the reader into an understanding of an older passage. In the last chapter of the book, Lewis talks about language in general: what it does, how it describes, and how it wounds. He comments upon the purpose of poetry and about what happens to the emotional content of words as they undergo linguistic shifts.

In the days following the death of his wife Joy in July 1960, C.S. Lewis writes A Grief Observed. It is a short book as an examination of the grief he suffers due to the loss of his wife and its effect on him and his thinking. Lewis has lost Joy, and with her, all of his creativity. He can no longer think, write, or pray. He has no words and can only repeat the conventional prayers everybody knows. This impedes his spirituality, and so Lewis begins a close study of his grief, what it is like and how it works in him. His intense search for understanding helps him control his grief. He discovers that Joy is more real to him now than in life. A Grief Observed is published in September 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. N.W. stands for Nat Whilk, Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not who’, that is, anonymous. The only person, besides Lewis’s publisher, who is told of the book’s existence is his friend Roger Lancelyn Green (1918–1987). A Grief Observed does not sell well until it is reissued posthumously under Lewis’s own name in 1964.

In October 1961, C.S. Lewis publishes An Experiment in Criticism. In this book, he explores the act of literary criticism and the significance of systematic reading, elucidating notions that were often implicit or explored only in his earlier works. In the study of literature, Lewis is opposed to reading commentaries and criticisms before or even instead of the works themselves. He argues for looking at books from the point of view of the reader. Instead of judging our literary taste by what we read, Lewis proposes that we judge literature by how we read it. We must define what constitutes good reading rather than good books. Instead of classifying books, Lewis classifies readers and how they use and receive books. What a reader gets from reading is a voyage beyond the limits of his personal point of view, an annihilation of his own psychology rather than its assertion. It is about a desire to get out of himself and to see through other eyes. According to Lewis, all good reading is getting ourselves out of the way and fully encountering what an author provides. It is not about what we do with books but what books do with us.

This collection of essays includes the following pieces:

• De Descriptione Temporum (inaugural address as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University on 29 November 1954)
• The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version (The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the University of London on 20 March 1950)
• Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem? (Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy 1942)
• Kipling’s World (address to the English Association in the 1940s)
• Sir Walter Scott (address given to The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club in 1956)
• Lilies That Fester (first published in Twentieth Century, Vol. 157, April 1955)
• Psycho-analysis and Literary Criticism (address to a literary society at Westfield in 1942)
• The Inner Ring (delivered as a ‘Commemoration Oration’ at King’s College, University of London on 14 December 1944)
• Is Theology Poetry? (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 16 November 1944)
• Transposition (expanded version of Pentecost sermon at Mansfield College, Oxford on 28 May 1944)
• On Obstinacy in Belief (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 30 April 1953)
• The Weight of Glory (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 8 June 1941)

C.S. Lewis tries to write about prayer since 1952, but the idea does not take off. In December 1952, he begins writing a book on it and works on it in 1953, but he gives it up early in 1954. Lewis knows he has not found the right form for what he has to say about prayer until the idea comes to him of an imaginary correspondence between himself and a fictitious friend called ‘Malcolm’ in the spring of 1963. It occurs to Lewis that he might use once again the semi-fictional method of his earlier books, The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. In this form, the book’s ideas about prayer and the Christian life are not conveyed as concepts but embedded in the events and activities of personal life stories. In March and April 1963, about six months before his death, Lewis writes twenty-two letters to the imaginary correspondence on prayer. His last book, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, is published posthumously in January 1964.

In June 1961, C.S. Lewis becomes ill and is diagnosed with a seriously enlarged prostate. Surgery is scheduled, but it turns out that Lewis’s health is not good enough to withstand an operation. He is forbidden to go to work at Cambridge University. Therefore, Lewis rests at home in Oxford, where he reads a lot, takes blood transfusions, and puts his papers and lectures in order. From this, he produces what is published posthumously in May 1964 as The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. The book is based on several series of lectures given by Lewis over many years, some of which he repeats many times.

This is the first collection of C.S. Lewis’s poetry published in various places over the years. It is edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020). The collection is structured in four parts and includes the following poems:

The Hidden Country

• A Confession
• Impenitence
• A Cliché Came Out of Its Cage
• Pan’s Purge
• Narnian Suite
• The Magician and the Dryad
• The True Nature of Gnomes
• The Birth of Language
• The Planets
• Pindar Sang
• Hermione in the House of Paulina
• Young King Cole
• The Prodigality of Firdausi
• Le Roi S’Amuse
• Vitrea Circe
• The Landing
• The Day With a White Mark
• Donkey’s Delight
• The Small Man Orders His Wedding
• The Country of the Blind
• On Being Human
• The Ecstasy
• The Saboteuse
• The Last of the Wine
• As One Oldster to Another
• Ballade of Dead Gentlemen
• The Adam Unparadised
• The Adam at Night
• Solomon
• The Late Passenger
• The Turn of the Tide

The Backward Glance

• Evolutionary Hymn
• Prelude to Space: An Epithalamium
• Science-Fiction Cradlesong
• An Expostulation: Against Too Many Writers of Science-Fiction
• Odora Canum Vis: A Defence of Certain Modern Biographers and Critics
• On a Vulgar Error
• The Future of Forestry
• Lines During a General Election
• The Condemned
• The Genuine Article
• On the Atomic Bomb: Metrical Experiment
• To the Author of Flowering Rigle
• To Roy Campbell
• Coronation March
• ‘Man is a Lumpe Where All Beasts Kneaded Be’
• On a Picture by Chirico
• On a Theme from Nicolas of Cusa
• What the Bird Said Early in the Year
• The Salamander
• Infatuation
• Vowels and Sirens
• The Prudent Jailer
• Aubade
• Pattern
• After Aristotle
• Reason
• To Andrew Marvell
• Lines Written in a Copy of Milton’s Works
• Scholar’s Melancholy

A Larger World

• Wormwood
• Virtue’s Independence
• Postering
• Deception
• Deadly Sins
• The Dragon Speaks
• Dragon-Slayer
• A Pageant Played in Vain
• When the Curtain’s Down
• Divine Justice
• Eden’s Courtesy
• The Meteorite
• The Kinds of Memory
• Re-adjustment
• Nearly They Stood
• Relapse
• Late Summer
• To a Friend
• To Charles Williams
• After Vain Pretence
• Angel’s Song
• Joys that Sting
• Old Poets Remembered
• As the Ruin Falls

Further Up & Further In

• Poem for Psychoanalysts and/or Theologians
• Noon’s Intensity
• Sweet Desire
• Caught
• Forbidden Pleasure
• The Naked Seed
• Scazons
• Legion
• Pilgrim’s Problem
• Sonnet
• The Phoenix
• The Nativity
• Prayer
• Love’s as Warm as Tears
• No Beauty We Could Desire
• Stephen to Lazarus
• Five Sonnets
• Evensong
• The Apologist’s Evening Prayer
• Footnote to All Prayers
• After Prayers, Lie Cold

This collection of essays includes the following pieces:

• Screwtape Proposes a Toast (first published in The Saturday Evening Post, 19 December 1959)
• The Inner Ring (delivered as a ‘Commemoration Oration’ at King’s College, University of London on 14 December 1944)
• Is Theology Poetry? (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 16 November 1944)
• On Obstinacy in Belief (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 30 April 1953)
• Transposition (expanded version of Pentecost sermon at Mansfield College, Oxford on 28 May 1944)
• The Weight of Glory (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 8 June 1941)
• Good Work and Good Works (first published in The Catholic Art Quarterly, Vol. 23, Christmas 1959)
• A Slip of the Tongue (C.S. Lewis’s last sermon, preached at the chapel of Magdalene College, Cambridge at Evensong on 29 January 1956)

This collection of essays, collected by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), includes the following pieces:

• De Audiendis Poetis
• The Genesis of a Medieval Book
• Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages
• Dante’s Similes
• Imagery in the Last Eleven Cantos of Dante’s Comedy
• Dante’s Statius
• The Morte Darthur
• Tasso
• Edmund Spenser: 1522-99
• On Reading The Faerie Queene
• Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser
• Spenser’s Cruel Cupid
• Genius and Genius
• A Note on Comus

This is a deliberate selection of letters and diary entries of C.S. Lewis originally prepared by his older brother, Warren (1895–1973). After Lewis’s death in November 1963, Warren is asked to write a biography of his brother. He agrees and uses The Lewis Family Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family 1850–1930, an eleven-volume collection of letters, diary entries and family papers, as his basis. To prepare the new biography, Warren retypes letters and diary entries, intersperses them with explanatory notes and commentaries, and adds a lengthy memoir. However, the book’s editors make substantial changes to it. They revise the biography as a collection of letters, cut the contents in half, and add some letters. In April 1966, the book is published.

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following essays and stories:

Essays

• On Stories (first published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams in December 1947)
• On Three Ways of Writing for Children (lecture at the Bournemouth Conference of the Library Association in April-May 1952)
• Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said (first published in The New York Times Book Review on 18 November 1956)
• On Juvenile Tastes (letter to the Church Times, Children’s Books Supplement, 28 November 1958)
• It All Began with a Picture… (article in Radio Times, Vol. 148, 15 July 1960)
• On Criticism (unfinished essay)
• On Science Fiction (address to the Cambridge University English Club on 24 November 1955)
• A Reply to Professor Haldane (previously unpublished response to J.B.S. Haldane)
• Unreal Estates (first published as ‘C.S. Lewis Discusses Science Fiction with Kingsley Amis’ in SF Horizons, Vol. 1, Spring 1964)

Stories

• The Shoddy Lands (story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 10, February 1956)
• Ministering Angels (story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 13, January 1958)
• Forms of Things Unknown (story first published in Fifty-Two: A Journal of Books & Authors, Vol. 18, August 1966)
• After Ten Years (fragment of a novel)

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following pieces:

• Christianity and Literature (delivered at the invitation of a religious society in Oxford in the late 1930s)
• Christianity and Culture (first published in Theology, Vol. 40, March 1940)
• Religion: Reality or Substitute? (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 19, September-October 1941)
• On Ethics
• De Futilitate (address at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1942 or 1943)
• The Poison of Subjectivism (first published in Religion in Life, Vol. 12, Summer 1943)
• The Funeral of a Great Myth
• On Church Music (first published in English Church Music, Vol. 19, April 1949)
• Historicism (first published in The Month, Vol. 4, October 1950)
• The Psalms
• The Language of Religion (lecture at the Colston Research Society, Bristol in March 1960)
• Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer (lecture at the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1958)
• Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism / Fern-seed and Elephants (lecture at Westcott House, Cambridge on 11 May 1959)
• The Seeing Eye (first published in Show, Vol. 3, February 1963)

As Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, C.S. Lewis gives lectures on the epic poem The Faerie Queene by the English poet Edmund Spencer (1552–1599). Lewis first reads The Faerie Queene between September 1915 and March 1916 as part of his reading program under the tutorship of William Kirkpatrick (1848–1921) in Great Bookham. Lewis rereads the poem many times throughout his life and lectures on it. He plans to use his lecture notes as the basis for a book, but he dies before he can write it. His former student and later colleague, Alister Fowler (1930–2022), takes Lewis’s notes and amplifies them into a readable and coherent account, as close to Lewis’s views as possible. In 1967, it is published as Spencer’s Images of Life (edited by Alaister Fowler). The book shows how to read The Faerie Queene, according to Lewis. The poem should be read as a good story and requires us to empathise with the way of thinking of the time it was written, the time of the Elizabethans. For the reader of The Faerie Queene, the historical is nothing more than a point of departure. The proper interpretive movement is from the real, historical people into the work of art. In Lewis’s view, the poem is not a story or an epic but a pageant of the universe, nature, and life.

In October 1950, C.S. Lewis responds to a letter from an American lady, a journalist, poet, and critic, Mary Willis Shelburn (1895–1975). They begin a regular correspondence lasting thirteen years. This book is a collection of 138 letters to Shelburn, comprising 132 from C.S. Lewis, one from his wife Joy, three from his brother Warren, and two from his former secretary, biographer, and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper. The book is edited by Clyde S. Kilby (1902–1986), professor of English Language at Wheaton College, Illinois (USA), and founder of the Marion E. Wade Center there. It is a research library and archive for seven British authors: Owen Barfield (1898–1997), G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936), C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), George MacDonald (1824–1905), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957), J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), and Charles Williams (1886–1945).

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following poems:

• Dymer (first published in September 1926)
• Launcelot
• The Nameless Isle
• The Queen of Drum

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following pieces:

• De Descriptione Temporum (inaugural address as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University on 29 November 1954)
• The Alliterative Metre (first published in Lysistrata, Vol. 2, May 1935)
• What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato (first published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Vol. 17, 1932)
• The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line (first published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Vol. 24, 1939)
• Hero and Leander (first published in The Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 38, 1952)
• Variation in Shakespeare and Others
• Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem? (Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy 1942)
• Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century (first published in Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson in 1938)
• The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version (The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the University of London on 20 March 1950)
• The Vision of John Bunyan (first published in the BBC’s own periodical The Listener, Vol. 68, 13 December 1962)
• Addison (first published in Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith in 1945)
• Four-Letter Words (first published in The Critical Quarterly, Vol. 3, Summer 1961)
• A Note on Jane Austen (first published in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 4, October 1954)
• Shelley, Dryden, and Mr Eliot
• Sir Walter Scott (address given to The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club in 1956)
• William Morris
• Kipling’s World (address to the English Association in the 1940s)
• Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare (address at Manchester University in the 1930s)
• High and Low Brows (address to the English Society at Oxford in the 1930s)
• Metre (first published in A Review of English Literature, Vol. 1, January 1960)
• Psycho-analysis and Literary Criticism (address to a literary society at Westfield in 1942)
• The Anthropological Approach (first published in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday in 1962)

Published under this title in the U.S.A in November 1970. Published in the U.K. as Undeceptions. Essays on Theology and Ethics in 1971. This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following essays and letters:

Essays

• Evil and God (first published in The Spectator on 7 February 1941)
• Miracles (first published in Saint Jude’s Gazette, No. 73, October 1942)
• Dogma and the Universe (first published in two parts in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 19 and 26 March 1943)
• Answers to Questions on Christianity (report of a discussion with employees of EMI in Hayes on 18 April 1944)
• Myth Became Fact (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 22, September-October 1944)
• ‘Horrid Red Things’ (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 6 October 1944)
• Religion and Science (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 3 January 1945)
• The Laws of Nature (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 4 April 1945)
• The Grand Miracle (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 27 April 1945)
• Christian Apologetics (paper at the Carmarthen Conference for Youth Leaders and Junior Clergy, Easter 1945)
• Work and Prayer (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 28 May 1945)
• Man or Rabbit? (leaflet of the Student Christian Movement in Schools, 1946)
• On the Transmission of Christianity (‘Preface’ in How Heathen is Britain? by B.G. Sandhurst, 1946)
• Miserable Offenders (sermon delivered at St Matthews’s Church, Northampton on 7 April 1946)
• The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club (‘Preface’ in Socratic Digest, No. 1, 1943)
• Religion Without Dogma? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 4, 1948)
• Some Thoughts (first published in Ten Years of Work of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, 1948)
• ‘The Trouble With “X”…’ (first published in Bristol Diocesan Gazette in August 1948)
• What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ? (first published in Asking Them Questions, Third Series, 1950)
• The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology (first published in The Month, February 1950)
• Is Theism Important? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 5, 1952)
• Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger (first published in The Christian Century, Vol. 75, 26 November 1958)
• Must Our Image of God Go? (first published in The Observer on 24 March 1963)
• Dangers of National Repentance (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 15 March 1940)
• Two Ways With the Self (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 3 May 1940)
• Meditation on the Third Commandment (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 10 January 1941)
• On the Reading of Old Books (‘Introduction’ in The Incarnation of the Word of God, a translation of De Incarnatione Verbi by Athanasius, 1944)
• Two Lectures (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 21 February 1945)
• Meditation in a Toolshed (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 17 July 1945)
• Scraps (first published in St James Magazine, December 1945)
• The Decline of Religion (first published in The Cherwell on 29 November 1946)
• Vivisection (leaflet of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 1947)
• Modern Translations of the Bible (‘Preface’ in Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles by J.B. Philips, 1947)
• Priestesses in the Church? (first published in Time and Tide on 14 August 1948)
• God in the Dock (first published in Lumen Vitae, Vol. 3, September 1948)
• Behind the Scenes (first published in Time and Tide on 1 December 1956)
• Revival or Decay? (first published in Punch on 9 July 1958)
• Before We Can Communicate (first published in Breakthrough, No. 8, October 1961)
• Cross-Examination (first published in Decision, September-October 1963)
• ‘Bulverism’ (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 2, June 1944)
• First and Second Things (first published in Time and Tide, 27 June 1942)
• The Sermon and the Lunch (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 21 September 1945)
• The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment (first published in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, Vol. 3, 1949)
• Xmas and Christmas (first published in Time and Tide on 4 December 1954)
• What Christmas Means to Me (first published in The Twentieth Century, Vol. 162, December 1957)
• Delinquents in the Snow (first published in Time and Tide on 7 December 1957)
• Willing Slaves of the Welfare State (first published in The Observer on 20 July 1958)
• We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’ (first published in The Saturday Evening Post on 28 December 1963)

Letters

• The Conditions for a Just War (letter in Theology, No. 30, May 1939)
• The Conflict in Anglican Theology (letter in Theology, No. 41, November 1940)
• Miracles (letter in The Guardian on 16 October 1942)
• Mr C.S. Lewis on Christianity (letter in The Listener on 9 March 1944)
• A Village Experience (letter in The Guardian on 31 August 1945)
• Correspondence with an Anglican Who Dislikes Hymns (letter in The Presbyter, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1948)
• The Church’s Liturgy, Invocation and Invocation of Saints (letters in Church Times on 20 May, 1 July, 15 July, and 5 August 1949)
• The Holy Name (letter in Church Times on 10 August 1951)
• Mere Christians (letter in Church Times on 8 February 1952)
• Canonization (letter in Church Times on 24 October 1952)
• Version Vernacular (letter in The Christian Century on 31 December 1958)
• Capital Punishment and Death Penalty (letters in Church Times on 1 and 15 December 1961)

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following pieces:

• Membership (address to the Society of St Alban & St Sergius, Oxford on 10 February 1945)
• Learning in War-Time (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 22 October 1939)
• On Forgiveness (written for a church magazine in 1947)
• Historicism (first published in The Month, Vol. 4, October 1950)
• The World’s Last Night (first published as ‘Christian Hope – Its meaning for today’ in Religion in Life, Vol. 21, winter 1951–1952)
• Religion and Rocketry (first published as ‘Will We Lose God in Outer Space?’, in Christian Herald, Vol. 81, April 1958)
• The Efficacy of Prayer (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1959)
• Fern-Seed and Elephants / Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism (lecture at Westcott House, Cambridge on 11 May 1959)

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following stories:

• The Dark Tower (disputed fragment of a novel)
• The Man Born Blind (first published in Church Times on 4 February 1977)
• The Shoddy Lands (story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 10, February 1956)
• Ministering Angels (story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 13, January 1958)
• Forms of Things Unknown (story first published in Fifty-Two: A Journal of Books & Authors, Vol. 18, August 1966)
• After Ten Years (fragment of a novel)

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), is a selection from God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, published in the U.S.A. in November 1970, and contains the following pieces:

• Miracles (first published in Saint Jude’s Gazette, No. 73, October 1942)
• Dogma and the Universe (first published in two parts in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 19 and 26 March 1943)
• Myth Became Fact (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 22, September-October 1944)
• Religion and Science (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 3 January 1945)
• The Laws of Nature (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 4 April 1945)
• The Grand Miracle (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 27 April 1945)
• Man or Rabbit? (leaflet of the Student Christian Movement in Schools, 1946)
• ‘The Trouble With “X”…’ (first published in Bristol Diocesan Gazette in August 1948)
• What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ? (first published in Asking Them Questions, Third Series, 1950)
• Must Our Image of God Go? (first published in The Observer on 24 March 1963)
• Priestesses in the Church? (first published in Time and Tide on 14 August 1948)
• God in the Dock (first published in Lumen Vitae, Vol. 3, September 1948)
• We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’ (first published in The Saturday Evening Post on 28 December 1963)

In 1914, before leaving home for his last term at Malvern College, C.S. Lewis finds a new friend, Arthur Greeves (1895–1966), who lives directly across the road from Lewis’s Belfast home ‘Little Lea’. They discover a common delight in Norse mythology. Although they are both quite different, the boys become close friends and confidants, and a lifelong friendship and correspondence begins. Unfortunately, Lewis does not preserve many of Arthur’s letters, but Arthur keeps almost all of Lewis’s. In 1979, these letters are published in They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves 1914–1963, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020).

Published under this title in the U.S.A. This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), is a revised and expanded version of The Weight of Glory, published in the U.S.A. in 1949. The collection contains the following pieces:

• The Weight of Glory (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 8 June 1941)
• Learning in War-Time (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 22 October 1939)
• Why I Am Not a Pacifist (talk given to an Oxford pacifist society at its request in 1940)
• Transposition (expanded version of Pentecost sermon at Mansfield College, Oxford on 28 May 1944)
• Is Theology Poetry? (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 16 November 1944)
• The Inner Ring (delivered as a ‘Commemoration Oration’ at King’s College, University of London on 14 December 1944)
• Membership (address to the Society of St Alban & St Sergius, Oxford on 10 February 1945)
• On Forgiveness (written for a church magazine in 1947)
• A Slip of the Tongue (C.S. Lewis’s last sermon, preached at the chapel of Magdalene College, Cambridge at Evensong on 29 January 1956)

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), is a selection from God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, published in the U.S.A. in November 1970, and contains the following pieces:

• Miracles (first published in Saint Jude’s Gazette, No. 73, October 1942)
• Dogma and the Universe (first published in two parts in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 19 and 26 March 1943)
• Answers to Questions on Christianity (report of a discussion with employees of EMI in Hayes on 18 April 1944)
• Myth Became Fact (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 22, September-October 1944)
• ‘Horrid Red Things’ (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 6 October 1944)
• Religion and Science (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 3 January 1945)
• The Laws of Nature (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 4 April 1945)
• The Grand Miracle (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 27 April 1945)
• Christian Apologetics (paper at the Carmarthen Conference for Youth Leaders and Junior Clergy, Easter 1945)
• Work and Prayer (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 28 May 1945)
• Man or Rabbit? (leaflet of the Student Christian Movement in Schools, 1946)
• Religion Without Dogma? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 4, 1948)
• Some Thoughts (first published in Ten Years of Work of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, 1948)
• ‘The Trouble With “X”…’ (first published in Bristol Diocesan Gazette in August 1948)
• What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ? (first published in Asking Them Questions, Third Series, 1950)
• Dangers of National Repentance (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 15 March 1940)
• Two Ways With the Self (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 3 May 1940)
• On the Reading of Old Books (‘Introduction’ in The Incarnation of the Word of God, a translation of De Incarnatione Verbi by Athanasius, 1944)
• Scraps (first published in St James Magazine, December 1945)
• The Decline of Religion (first published in The Cherwell on 29 November 1946)
• Vivisection (leaflet of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 1947)
• Modern Translations of the Bible (‘Preface’ in Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles by J.B. Philips, 1947)
• God in the Dock (first published in Lumen Vitae, Vol. 3, September 1948)
• Cross-Examination (first published in Decision, September-October 1963)
• The Sermon and the Lunch (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 21 September 1945)
• What Christmas Means to Me (first published in The Twentieth Century, Vol. 162, December 1957)

This collection, published in the U.S.A. as On Stories: and Other Essays on Literature on 24 June 1982, is edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), and contains the following pieces:

• On Stories (first published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams in December 1947)
• The Novels of Charles Williams (BBC radio talk on 11 February 1949)
• A Tribute to E.R. Eddison (cover text for the novel The Menzentian Gate by Eric Eddison)
• On Three Ways of Writing for Children (lecture at the Bournemouth Conference of the Library Association in April-May 1952)
• Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said (first published in The New York Times Book Review on 18 November 1956)
• On Juvenile Tastes (letter to the Church Times, Children’s Books Supplement, 28 November 1958)
• It All Began with a Picture… (article in Radio Times, Vol. 148, 15 July 1960)
• On Science Fiction (address to the Cambridge University English Club on 24 November 1955)
• A Reply to Professor Haldane (previously unpublished response to J.B.S. Haldane)
• The Hobbit (first published in The Times Literary Supplement on 2 October 1937)
• Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (first published in Time and Tide on 14 August 1954)
• A Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers (contribution to the memorial service for the writer Dorothy L. Sayers at St Margaret’s Church in Londen on 15 January 1958)
• The mythopoeic gift of Rider Haggard (first published as ‘Haggard Rides Again’ in Time and Tide on 3 September 1960)
• George Orwell (first published in Time and Tide on 8 January 1955)
• The Death of Words (first published in The Spectator on 22 September 1944)
• The Parthenon and the Optative (first published in Time and Tide on 11 March 1944)
• Period Criticism (first published in Time and Tide on 9 November 1946)
• Different Tastes in Literature (first published in two parts in Time and Tide on 25 May and 1 June 1946)
• On Criticism (unfinished essay)
• Unreal Estates (first published as ‘C.S. Lewis Discusses Science Fiction with Kingsley Amis’ in SF Horizons, Vol. 1, Spring 1964)

This volume contains a sampling of C.S. Lewis’s letters to young correspondents from many different countries. It also includes an introduction by the editors, a foreword by C.S. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham (1945), a biographical piece on Lewis’s childhood, and an annotated children’s bibliography to C.S. Lewis.

During the years at his Belfast home ‘Little Lea’, C.S. Lewis creates with his brother Warren through drawings and stories an imaginary world they call ‘Boxen’. In October 1985, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, publishes a collection of Lewis’s early stories, histories, and drawings under the title Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis.

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following pieces:

• ‘Bulverism’ (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 2, June 1944)
• First and Second Things (first published in Time and Tide, 27 June 1942)
• On the Reading of Old Books (‘Introduction’ in The Incarnation of the Word of God, a translation of De Incarnatione Verbi by Athanasius, 1944)
• ‘Horrid Red Things’ (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 6 October 1944)
• Work and Prayer (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 28 May 1945)
• Two Lectures (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 21 February 1945)
• Meditation in a Toolshed (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 17 July 1945)
• The Sermon and the Lunch (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 21 September 1945)
• On the Transmission of Christianity (‘Preface’ in How Heathen is Britain? by B.G. Sandhurst, 1946)
• The Decline of Religion (first published in The Cherwell on 29 November 1946)
• Vivisection (leaflet of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 1947)
• Modern Translations of the Bible (‘Preface’ in Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles by J.B. Philips, 1947)
• Some Thoughts (first published in Ten Years of Work of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, 1948)
• The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment (first published in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, Vol. 3, 1949)
• Xmas and Christmas (first published in Time and Tide on 4 December 1954)
• Revival or Decay? (first published in Punch on 9 July 1958)
• Before We Can Communicate (first published in Breakthrough, No. 8, October 1961)

Published under this title in the U.S.A. in 1986. This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), is a reprint of Christian Reflections, published in the U.K. in 1967, with one piece omitted (‘On Church Music’). The collection contains the following pieces:

• Christianity and Literature (delivered at the invitation of a religious society in Oxford in the late 1930s)
• Christianity and Culture (first published in Theology, Vol. 40, March 1940)
• Religion: Reality or Substitute? (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 19, September-October 1941)
• On Ethics
• De Futilitate (address at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1942 or 1943)
• The Poison of Subjectivism (first published in Religion in Life, Vol. 12, Summer 1943)
• The Funeral of a Great Myth
• Historicism (first published in The Month, Vol. 4, October 1950)
• The Psalms
• The Language of Religion (lecture at the Colston Research Society, Bristol in March 1960)
• Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer (lecture at the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1958)
• Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism / Fern-seed and Elephants (lecture at Westcott House, Cambridge on 11 May 1959)
• The Seeing Eye (first published in Show, Vol. 3, February 1963)

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following pieces:

• The Necessity of Chivalry (first published in Time and Tide on 17 August 1940)
• Equality (first published in The Spectator on 27 August 1943)
• Three Kinds of Men (first published in The Sunday Times on 21 March 1943)
• My First School (first published in Time and Tide on 4 September 1943)
• Is English Doomed? (first published in The Spectator on 11 February 1944)
• Democratic Education (first published in Time and Tide on 29 April 1944)
• A Dream (first published in The Spectator on 28 July 1944)
• Blimpophobia (first published in Time and Tide on 9 September 1944)
• Private Bates (first published in The Spectator on 29 December 1944)
• Hedonics (first published in Time and Tide on 16 June 1945)
• After Priggery – What? (first published in The Spectator on 7 December 1945)
• Modern Man and His Categories of Thought (written in October 1946 at the request of theologian Stephen Neill for the study section of the World Council of Churches)
• Talking about Bicycles (first published in Resistance: A Social and Literary Magazine, October 1946)
• On Living in an Atomic Age (first published in Informed Reading, No. 6, 1948)
• The Empty Universe (‘Preface’ in The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe by D.E. Harding)
• Prudery and Philology (first published in The Spectator on 21 January 1955)
• Interim Report (first published in The Cambridge Review, Vol. 77, 21 April 1956)
• Is History Bunk? (first published in The Cambridge Review, Vol. 78, 1 June 1957)
• Sex in Literature (first published in The Sunday Telegraph on 30 September 1962)

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following essays and letters:

Essays

• Christian Apologetics (paper at the Carmarthen Conference for Youth Leaders and Junior Clergy, Easter 1945)
• Answers to Questions on Christianity (report of a discussion with employees of EMI in Hayes on 18 April 1944)
• Why I Am Not a Pacifist (talk given to an Oxford pacifist society at its request in 1940)
• The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology (first published in The Month, February 1950)
• The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club (‘Preface’ in Socratic Digest, No. 1, 1943)
• Religion Without Dogma? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 4, 1948)
• Is Theism Important? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 5, 1952)
• Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger (first published in The Christian Century, Vol. 75, 26 November 1958)
• Willing Slaves of the Welfare State (first published in The Observer on 20 July 1958)

Letters

• The Conditions for a Just War (letter in Theology, No. 30, May 1939)
• The Conflict in Anglican Theology (letter in Theology, No. 41, November 1940)
• Miracles (letter in The Guardian on 16 October 1942)
• Mr C.S. Lewis on Christianity (letter in The Listener on 9 March 1944)
• A Village Experience (letter in The Guardian on 31 August 1945)
• Correspondence with an Anglican Who Dislikes Hymns (letter in The Presbyter, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1948)
• The Church’s Liturgy, Invocation and Invocation of Saints (letters in Church Times on 20 May, 1 July, 15 July, and 5 August 1949)
• The Holy Name (letter in Church Times on 10 August 1951)
• Mere Christians (letter in Church Times on 8 February 1952)
• Canonization (letter in Church Times on 24 October 1952)
• Version Vernacular (letter in The Christian Century on 31 December 1958)
• Capital Punishment and Death Penalty (letters in Church Times on 1 and 15 December 1961)

This book contains thirty-five letters written in Latin, with English translations, between C.S. Lewis and Don Giovanni Calabria (1873–1954), a priest in Italy, and, after his death, to Don Luigi Pedrollo (1888–1986), a priest in Calabria’s church in Verona. The letters span the years 1947–1961. The correspondence begins in 1947 after Calabria has read Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The letters of the correspondence are edited and translated by Lewis’s friend and former student Martin Moynihan (1916–2007).

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following pieces:

• Christian Reunion (posthumously published in this 1990 essay collection, probably written in 1944)
• Lilies That Fester (first published in Twentieth Century, Vol. 157, April 1955)
• Evil and God (first published in The Spectator on 7 February 1941)
• Dangers of National Repentance (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 15 March 1940)
• Two Ways With the Self (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 3 May 1940)
• Meditation on the Third Commandment (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 10 January 1941)
• Scraps (first published in St James Magazine, December 1945)
• Miserable Offenders (sermon delivered at St Matthews’s Church, Northampton on 7 April 1946)
• Cross-Examination (first published in Decision, September-October 1963)
• Behind the Scenes (first published in Time and Tide on 1 December 1956)
• What Christmas Means to Me (first published in The Twentieth Century, Vol. 162, December 1957)
• Delinquents in the Snow (first published in Time and Tide on 7 December 1957)

In 1922, C.S. Lewis begins keeping a diary. After the death of Father Albert Lewis in September 1929, this handwritten diary from 1922 to 1927 is typed out by Lewis’s brother Warren (1895–1973) and annotated by them. In April 1991, the transcribed and edited diary is published by former secretary and biographer of Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), as All My Road Before Me. The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927. The title, as selected by Hooper, is a quotation from Lewis’s poem Dymer.

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following poems:

Spirits in Bondage (1919)

Poems (1964 Collection)

• A Confession
• Impenitence
• A Cliché Came Out of Its Cage
• Pan’s Purge
• Narnian Suite
• The Magician and the Dryad
• The True Nature of Gnomes
• The Birth of Language
• The Planets
• Pindar Sang
• Hermione in the House of Paulina
• Young King Cole
• The Prodigality of Firdausi
• Le Roi S’Amuse
• Vitrea Circe
• The Landing
• The Day With a White Mark
• Donkey’s Delight
• The Small Man Orders His Wedding
• The Country of the Blind
• On Being Human
• The Ecstasy
• The Saboteuse
• The Last of the Wine
• As One Oldster to Another
• Ballade of Dead Gentlemen
• The Adam Unparadised
• The Adam at Night
• Solomon
• The Late Passenger
• The Turn of the Tide
• Evolutionary Hymn
• Prelude to Space: An Epithalamium
• Science-Fiction Cradlesong
• An Expostulation: Against Too Many Writers of Science-Fiction
• Odora Canum Vis: A Defence of Certain Modern Biographers and Critics
• On a Vulgar Error
• The Future of Forestry
• Lines During a General Election
• The Condemned
• The Genuine Article
• On the Atomic Bomb: Metrical Experiment
• To the Author of Flowering Rigle
• To Roy Campbell
• Coronation March
• ‘Man is a Lumpe Where All Beasts Kneaded Be’
• On a Picture by Chirico
• On a Theme from Nicolas of Cusa
• What the Bird Said Early in the Year
• The Salamander
• Infatuation
• Vowels and Sirens
• The Prudent Jailer
• Aubade
• Pattern
• After Aristotle
• Reason
• To Andrew Marvell
• Lines Written in a Copy of Milton’s Works
• Scholar’s Melancholy
• Wormwood
• Virtue’s Independence
• Postering
• Deception
• Deadly Sins
• The Dragon Speaks
• Dragon-Slayer
• A Pageant Played in Vain
• When the Curtain’s Down
• Divine Justice
• Eden’s Courtesy
• The Meteorite
• The Kinds of Memory
• Re-adjustment
• Nearly They Stood
• Relapse
• Late Summer
• To a Friend
• To Charles Williams
• After Vain Pretence
• Angel’s Song
• Joys that Sting
• Old Poets Remembered
• As the Ruin Falls
• Poem for Psychoanalysts and/or Theologians
• Noon’s Intensity
• Sweet Desire
• Caught
• Forbidden Pleasure
• The Naked Seed
• Scazons
• Legion
• Pilgrim’s Problem
• Sonnet
• The Phoenix
• The Nativity
• Prayer
• Love’s as Warm as Tears
• No Beauty We Could Desire
• Stephen to Lazarus
• Five Sonnets
• Evensong
• The Apologist’s Evening Prayer
• Footnote to All Prayers
• After Prayers, Lie Cold

A Miscellany of Additional Poems (poems marked by * previously unpublished)

• The Hills Down *
• Against Potpourri *
• A Prelude *
• Ballade of a Winter’s Morning *
• Laus Mortis *
• Sonnet – To Sir Philip Sydney *
• Of Ships *
• Couplets *
• Circe – A Fragment *
• Exercise *
• Joy *
• Leaving Forever the Home of One’s Youth *
• Awake My Lute!
• Essence
• Consolation
• Finchley Avenue
• Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following pieces:

• Why I Am Not a Pacifist (talk given to an Oxford pacifist society at its request in 1940)
• ‘Bulverism’ (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 2, June 1944)
• First and Second Things (first published in Time and Tide, 27 June 1942)
• Equality (first published in The Spectator on 27 August 1943)
• Three Kinds of Men (first published in The Sunday Times on 21 March 1943)
• ‘Horrid Red Things’ (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 6 October 1944)
• Democratic Education (first published in Time and Tide on 29 April 1944)
• A Dream (first published in The Spectator on 28 July 1944)
• Is English Doomed? (first published in The Spectator on 11 February 1944)
• Meditation in a Toolshed (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 17 July 1945)
• Hedonics (first published in Time and Tide on 16 June 1945)
• Christian Apologetics (paper at the Carmarthen Conference for Youth Leaders and Junior Clergy, Easter 1945)
• The Decline of Religion (first published in The Cherwell on 29 November 1946)
• Religion Without Dogma? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 4, 1948)
• Vivisection (leaflet of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 1947)
• Modern Translations of the Bible (‘Preface’ in Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles by J.B. Philips, 1947)
• On Living in an Atomic Age (first published in Informed Reading, No. 6, 1948)
• The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment (first published in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, Vol. 3, 1949)
• The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology (first published in The Month, February 1950)
• Is Theism Important? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 5, 1952)
• Xmas and Christmas (first published in Time and Tide on 4 December 1954)
• Prudery and Philology (first published in The Spectator on 21 January 1955)
• Is History Bunk? (first published in The Cambridge Review, Vol. 78, 1 June 1957)
• Willing Slaves of the Welfare State (first published in The Observer on 20 July 1958)

From his first broadcasts over the BBC in August 1941, C.S. Lewis is inundated with letters. As he gains more readers, the pile of letters grows larger, especially after the publication of his books The Screwtape Letters and Miracles in America in February 1943 and September 1947. The 8 September 1947 issue of Time Magazine features Lewis on its cover, with an article inside about C.S. Lewis as one of the growing band of intellectuals who came to believe in God. As a result, Lewis receives a great many letters and parcels with gifts from American admirers. Many gifts are shared with others outside The Kilns. Answering all the letters would have been impossible without the help of Lewis’s brother, Warren. In the afternoon of 7 June 1962, Lewis gives tea to a young man from North Carolina, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), who is teaching at the University of Kentucky. They have been corresponding since 1954. During the following weeks, Lewis meets Hooper a lot at The Kilns, and he takes him along to the meeting of the Inklings. Lewis asks Hooper to be his personal secretary because there are hundreds of letters to respond to. After Lewis’s death, Hooper becomes a biographer of Lewis and the collector and editor of his writings. Lewis’s correspondence is published between 2000 and 2007 in the three volumes of C.S. Lewis. Collected Letters, edited by Walter Hooper.

This collection of essays, letters to the editor, and short stories by C.S. Lewis contains the following pieces:

Essays

• The Grand Miracle (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 27 April 1945)
• Is Theology Poetry? (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 16 November 1944)
• The Funeral of a Great Myth
• God in the Dock (first published in Lumen Vitae, Vol. 3, September 1948)
• What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ? (first published in Asking Them Questions, Third Series, 1950)
• The World’s Last Night (first published as ‘Christian Hope – Its meaning for today’ in Religion in Life, Vol. 21, winter 1951–1952)
• Is Theism Important? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 5, 1952)
• The Seeing Eye (first published in Show, Vol. 3, February 1963)
• Must Our Image of God Go? (first published in The Observer on 24 March 1963)
• Christianity and Culture (first published in Theology, Vol. 40, March 1940)
• Evil and God (first published in The Spectator on 7 February 1941)
• The Weight of Glory (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 8 June 1941)
• Miracles (first published in Saint Jude’s Gazette, No. 73, October 1942)
• Dogma and the Universe (first published in two parts in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 19 and 26 March 1943)
• ‘Horrid Red Things’ (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 6 October 1944)
• Religion: Reality or Substitute? (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 19, September-October 1941)
• Myth Became Fact (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 22, September-October 1944)
• Religion and Science (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 3 January 1945)
• Christian Apologetics (paper at the Carmarthen Conference for Youth Leaders and Junior Clergy, Easter 1945)
• Work and Prayer (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 28 May 1945)
• Religion Without Dogma? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 4, 1948)
• The Decline of Religion (first published in The Cherwell on 29 November 1946)
• On Forgiveness (written for a church magazine in 1947)
• The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology (first published in The Month, February 1950)
• Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer (lecture at the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1958)
• On Obstinacy in Belief (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 30 April 1953)
• What Christmas Means to Me (first published in The Twentieth Century, Vol. 162, December 1957)
• The Psalms
• Religion and Rocketry (first published as ‘Will We Lose God in Outer Space?’, in Christian Herald, Vol. 81, April 1958)
• The Efficacy of Prayer (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1959)
• Fern-Seed and Elephants / Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism (lecture at Westcott House, Cambridge on 11 May 1959)
• The Language of Religion (lecture at the Colston Research Society, Bristol in March 1960)
• Transposition (expanded version of Pentecost sermon at Mansfield College, Oxford on 28 May 1944)
• Why I Am Not a Pacifist (talk given to an Oxford pacifist society at its request in 1940)
• Dangers of National Repentance (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 15 March 1940)
• Two Ways With the Self (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 3 May 1940)
• Meditation on the Third Commandment (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 10 January 1941)
• On Ethics
• Three Kinds of Men (first published in The Sunday Times on 21 March 1943)
• Answers to Questions on Christianity (report of a discussion with employees of EMI in Hayes on 18 April 1944)
• The Laws of Nature (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 4 April 1945)
• Membership (address to the Society of St Alban & St Sergius, Oxford on 10 February 1945)
• The Sermon and the Lunch (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 21 September 1945)
• Scraps (first published in St James Magazine, December 1945)
• After Priggery – What? (first published in The Spectator on 7 December 1945)
• Man or Rabbit? (leaflet of the Student Christian Movement in Schools, 1946)
• ‘The Trouble With “X”…’ (first published in Bristol Diocesan Gazette in August 1948)
• On Living in an Atomic Age (first published in Informed Reading, No. 6, 1948)
• Lilies That Fester (first published in Twentieth Century, Vol. 157, April 1955)
• Good Work and Good Works (first published in The Catholic Art Quarterly, Vol. 23, Christmas 1959)
• A Slip of the Tongue (C.S. Lewis’s last sermon, preached at the chapel of Magdalene College, Cambridge at Evensong on 29 January 1956)
• We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’ (first published in The Saturday Evening Post on 28 December 1963)
• Christian Reunion (probably written in 1944)
• Priestesses in the Church? (first published in Time and Tide on 14 August 1948)
• On Church Music (first published in English Church Music, Vol. 19, April 1949)
• Christianity and Literature (delivered at the invitation of a religious society in Oxford in the late 1930s)
• High and Low Brows (address to the English Society at Oxford in the 1930s)
• Is English Doomed? (first published in The Spectator on 11 February 1944)
• On the Reading of Old Books (‘Introduction’ in The Incarnation of the Word of God, a translation of De Incarnatione Verbi by Athanasius, 1944)
• The Parthenon and the Optative (first published in Time and Tide on 11 March 1944)
• The Death of Words (first published in The Spectator on 22 September 1944)
• On Science Fiction (address to the Cambridge University English Club on 24 November 1955)
• Miserable Offenders (sermon delivered at St Matthews’s Church, Northampton on 7 April 1946)
• Different Tastes in Literature (first published in two parts in Time and Tide on 25 May and 1 June 1946)
• Modern Translations of the Bible (‘Preface’ in Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles by J.B. Philips, 1947)
• On Juvenile Tastes (letter to the Church Times, Children’s Books Supplement, 28 November 1958)
• Sex in Literature (first published in The Sunday Telegraph on 30 September 1962)
• The Hobbit (first published in The Times Literary Supplement on 2 October 1937)
• Period Criticism (first published in Time and Tide on 9 November 1946)
• On Stories (first published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams in December 1947)
• On Three Ways of Writing for Children (lecture at the Bournemouth Conference of the Library Association in April-May 1952)
• Prudery and Philology (first published in The Spectator on 21 January 1955)
• Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (first published in Time and Tide on 14 August 1954)
• Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said (first published in The New York Times Book Review on 18 November 1956)
• It All Began with a Picture… (article in Radio Times, Vol. 148, 15 July 1960)
• Unreal Estates (first published as ‘C.S. Lewis Discusses Science Fiction with Kingsley Amis’ in SF Horizons, Vol. 1, Spring 1964)
• On Criticism (unfinished essay)
• Cross-Examination (first published in Decision, September-October 1963)
• A Tribute to E.R. Eddison (cover text for the novel The Menzentian Gate by Eric Eddison)
• The mythopoeic gift of Rider Haggard (first published as ‘Haggard Rides Again’ in Time and Tide on 3 September 1960)
• George Orwell (first published in Time and Tide on 8 January 1955)
• A Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers (contribution to the memorial service for the writer Dorothy L. Sayers at St Margaret’s Church in Londen on 15 January 1958)
• The Novels of Charles Williams (BBC radio talk on 11 February 1949)
• Learning in War-Time (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 22 October 1939)
• ‘Bulverism’ (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 2, June 1944)
• The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club (‘Preface’ in Socratic Digest, No. 1, 1943)
• My First School (first published in Time and Tide on 4 September 1943)
• Democratic Education (first published in Time and Tide on 29 April 1944)
• Blimpophobia (first published in Time and Tide on 9 September 1944)
• Private Bates (first published in The Spectator on 29 December 1944)
• Meditation in a Toolshed (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 17 July 1945)
• On the Transmission of Christianity (‘Preface’ in How Heathen is Britain? by B.G. Sandhurst, 1946)
• Modern Man and His Categories of Thought (written in October 1946 at the request of theologian Stephen Neill for the study section of the World Council of Churches)
• Historicism (first published in The Month, Vol. 4, October 1950)
• The Empty Universe (‘Preface’ in The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe by D.E. Harding)
• Interim Report (first published in The Cambridge Review, Vol. 77, 21 April 1956)
• Is History Bunk? (first published in The Cambridge Review, Vol. 78, 1 June 1957)
• Before We Can Communicate (first published in Breakthrough, No. 8, October 1961)
• First and Second Things (first published in Time and Tide, 27 June 1942)
• The Poison of Subjectivism (first published in Religion in Life, Vol. 12, Summer 1943)
• Equality (first published in The Spectator on 27 August 1943)
• De Futilitate (address at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1942 or 1943)
• A Dream (first published in The Spectator on 28 July 1944)
• Hedonics (first published in Time and Tide on 16 June 1945)
• Talking about Bicycles (first published in Resistance: A Social and Literary Magazine, October 1946)
• Vivisection (leaflet of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 1947)
• The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment (first published in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, Vol. 3, 1949)
• Behind the Scenes (first published in Time and Tide on 1 December 1956)
• The Necessity of Chivalry (first published in Time and Tide on 17 August 1940)
• The Inner Ring (delivered as a ‘Commemoration Oration’ at King’s College, University of London on 14 December 1944)
• Two Lectures (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 21 February 1945)
• Some Thoughts (first published in Ten Years of Work of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, 1948)
• Xmas and Christmas (first published in Time and Tide on 4 December 1954)
• Revival or Decay? (first published in Punch on 9 July 1958)
• Delinquents in the Snow (first published in Time and Tide on 7 December 1957)
• Willing Slaves of the Welfare State (first published in The Observer on 20 July 1958)
• Screwtape Proposes a Toast (first published in The Saturday Evening Post, 19 December 1959)

Letters

• The Conditions for a Just War (letter in Theology, No. 30, May 1939)
• The Conflict in Anglican Theology (letter in Theology, No. 41, November 1940)
• Miracles (letter in The Guardian on 16 October 1942)
• Mr C.S. Lewis on Christianity (letter in The Listener on 9 March 1944)
• A Village Experience (letter in The Guardian on 31 August 1945)
• Correspondence with an Anglican Who Dislikes Hymns (letter in The Presbyter, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1948)
• The Church’s Liturgy, Invocation and Invocation of Saints (letters in Church Times on 20 May, 1 July, 15 July, and 5 August 1949)
• The Holy Name (letter in Church Times on 10 August 1951)
• Mere Christians (letter in Church Times on 8 February 1952)
• Canonization (letter in Church Times on 24 October 1952)
• Version Vernacular (letter in The Christian Century on 31 December 1958)
• Capital Punishment and Death Penalty (letters in Church Times on 1 and 15 December 1961)

Stories

• The Dark Tower (disputed fragment of a novel)
• The Man Born Blind (first published in Church Times on 4 February 1977)
• The Shoddy Lands (story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 10, February 1956)
• Ministering Angels (story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 13, January 1958)
• Forms of Things Unknown (story first published in Fifty-Two: A Journal of Books & Authors, Vol. 18, August 1966)
• After Ten Years (fragment of a novel)

This volume contains a selection from C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley, published in 2000. The collection contains the following essays and stories:

Essays

• Christianity and Literature (delivered at the invitation of a religious society in Oxford in the late 1930s)
• High and Low Brows (address to the English Society at Oxford in the 1930s)
• Is English Doomed? (first published in The Spectator on 11 February 1944)
• On the Reading of Old Books (‘Introduction’ in The Incarnation of the Word of God, a translation of De Incarnatione Verbi by Athanasius, 1944)
• The Parthenon and the Optative (first published in Time and Tide on 11 March 1944)
• The Death of Words (first published in The Spectator on 22 September 1944)
• On Science Fiction (address to the Cambridge University English Club on 24 November 1955)
• Miserable Offenders (sermon delivered at St Matthews’s Church, Northampton on 7 April 1946)
• Different Tastes in Literature (first published in two parts in Time and Tide on 25 May and 1 June 1946)
• Modern Translations of the Bible (‘Preface’ in Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles by J.B. Philips, 1947)
• On Juvenile Tastes (letter to the Church Times, Children’s Books Supplement, 28 November 1958)
• Sex in Literature (first published in The Sunday Telegraph on 30 September 1962)
• The Hobbit (first published in The Times Literary Supplement on 2 October 1937)
• On Stories (first published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams in December 1947)
• On Three Ways of Writing for Children (lecture at the Bournemouth Conference of the Library Association in April-May 1952)
• Prudery and Philology (first published in The Spectator on 21 January 1955)
• Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (first published in Time and Tide on 14 August 1954)
• Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said (first published in The New York Times Book Review on 18 November 1956)
• It All Began with a Picture… (article in Radio Times, Vol. 148, 15 July 1960)
• Unreal Estates (first published as ‘C.S. Lewis Discusses Science Fiction with Kingsley Amis’ in SF Horizons, Vol. 1, Spring 1964)
• On Criticism (unfinished essay)
• Cross-Examination (first published in Decision, September-October 1963)
• A Tribute to E.R. Eddison (cover text for the novel The Menzentian Gate by Eric Eddison)
• The mythopoeic gift of Rider Haggard (first published as ‘Haggard Rides Again’ in Time and Tide on 3 September 1960)
• George Orwell (first published in Time and Tide on 8 January 1955)
• A Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers (contribution to the memorial service for the writer Dorothy L. Sayers at St Margaret’s Church in Londen on 15 January 1958)
• The Novels of Charles Williams (BBC radio talk on 11 February 1949)
• Learning in War-Time (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 22 October 1939)
• ‘Bulverism’ (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 2, June 1944)
• The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club (‘Preface’ in Socratic Digest, No. 1, 1943)
• My First School (first published in Time and Tide on 4 September 1943)
• Democratic Education (first published in Time and Tide on 29 April 1944)
• Blimpophobia (first published in Time and Tide on 9 September 1944)
• Private Bates (first published in The Spectator on 29 December 1944)
• Meditation in a Toolshed (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 17 July 1945)
• On the Transmission of Christianity (‘Preface’ in How Heathen is Britain? by B.G. Sandhurst, 1946)
• Modern Man and His Categories of Thought (written in October 1946 at the request of theologian Stephen Neill for the study section of the World Council of Churches)
• Historicism (first published in The Month, Vol. 4, October 1950)
• The Empty Universe (‘Preface’ in The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe by D.E. Harding)
• Interim Report (first published in The Cambridge Review, Vol. 77, 21 April 1956)
• Is History Bunk? (first published in The Cambridge Review, Vol. 78, 1 June 1957)
• Before We Can Communicate (first published in Breakthrough, No. 8, October 1961)
• First and Second Things (first published in Time and Tide, 27 June 1942)
• The Poison of Subjectivism (first published in Religion in Life, Vol. 12, Summer 1943)
• Equality (first published in The Spectator on 27 August 1943)
• De Futilitate (address at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1942 or 1943)
• A Dream (first published in The Spectator on 28 July 1944)
• Hedonics (first published in Time and Tide on 16 June 1945)
• Talking about Bicycles (first published in Resistance: A Social and Literary Magazine, October 1946)
• Vivisection (leaflet of the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 1947)
• The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment (first published in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, Vol. 3, 1949)
• Behind the Scenes (first published in Time and Tide on 1 December 1956)
• The Necessity of Chivalry (first published in Time and Tide on 17 August 1940)
• The Inner Ring (delivered as a ‘Commemoration Oration’ at King’s College, University of London on 14 December 1944)
• Two Lectures (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 21 February 1945)
• Some Thoughts (first published in Ten Years of Work of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, 1948)
• Xmas and Christmas (first published in Time and Tide on 4 December 1954)
• Revival or Decay? (first published in Punch on 9 July 1958)
• Delinquents in the Snow (first published in Time and Tide on 7 December 1957)
• Willing Slaves of the Welfare State (first published in The Observer on 20 July 1958)

Stories

• The Dark Tower (disputed fragment of a novel)
• The Man Born Blind (first published in Church Times on 4 February 1977)
• The Shoddy Lands (story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 10, February 1956)
• Ministering Angels (story first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 13, January 1958)
• Forms of Things Unknown (story first published in Fifty-Two: A Journal of Books & Authors, Vol. 18, August 1966)
• After Ten Years (fragment of a novel)

This volume contains a selection from C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley, published in 2000. The collection contains the following essays and letters:

Essays

• The Grand Miracle (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 27 April 1945)
• Is Theology Poetry? (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 16 November 1944)
• The Funeral of a Great Myth
• God in the Dock (first published in Lumen Vitae, Vol. 3, September 1948)
• What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ? (first published in Asking Them Questions, Third Series, 1950)
• The World’s Last Night (first published as ‘Christian Hope – Its meaning for today’ in Religion in Life, Vol. 21, winter 1951–1952)
• Is Theism Important? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 5, 1952)
• The Seeing Eye (first published in Show, Vol. 3, February 1963)
• Must Our Image of God Go? (first published in The Observer on 24 March 1963)
• Christianity and Culture (first published in Theology, Vol. 40, March 1940)
• Evil and God (first published in The Spectator on 7 February 1941)
• The Weight of Glory (sermon at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford on 8 June 1941)
• Miracles (first published in Saint Jude’s Gazette, No. 73, October 1942)
• Dogma and the Universe (first published in two parts in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 19 and 26 March 1943)
• ‘Horrid Red Things’ (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 6 October 1944)
• Religion: Reality or Substitute? (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 19, September-October 1941)
• Myth Became Fact (first published in World Dominion, Vol. 22, September-October 1944)
• Religion and Science (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 3 January 1945)
• Christian Apologetics (paper at the Carmarthen Conference for Youth Leaders and Junior Clergy, Easter 1945)
• Work and Prayer (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 28 May 1945)
• Religion Without Dogma? (first published in Socratic Digest, No. 4, 1948)
• The Decline of Religion (first published in The Cherwell on 29 November 1946)
• On Forgiveness (written for a church magazine in 1947)
• The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology (first published in The Month, February 1950)
• Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer (lecture at the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1958)
• On Obstinacy in Belief (paper given to the Socratic Club, Oxford on 30 April 1953)
• What Christmas Means to Me (first published in The Twentieth Century, Vol. 162, December 1957)
• The Psalms
• Religion and Rocketry (first published as ‘Will We Lose God in Outer Space?’, in Christian Herald, Vol. 81, April 1958)
• The Efficacy of Prayer (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1959)
• Fern-Seed and Elephants / Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism (lecture at Westcott House, Cambridge on 11 May 1959)
• The Language of Religion (lecture at the Colston Research Society, Bristol in March 1960)
• Transposition (expanded version of Pentecost sermon at Mansfield College, Oxford on 28 May 1944)
• Why I Am Not a Pacifist (talk given to an Oxford pacifist society at its request in 1940)
• Dangers of National Repentance (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 15 March 1940)
• Two Ways With the Self (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 3 May 1940)
• Meditation on the Third Commandment (first published in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian on 10 January 1941)
• On Ethics
• Three Kinds of Men (first published in The Sunday Times on 21 March 1943)
• Answers to Questions on Christianity (report of a discussion with employees of EMI in Hayes on 18 April 1944)
• The Laws of Nature (first published in The Coventry Evening Telegraph on 4 April 1945)
• Membership (address to the Society of St Alban & St Sergius, Oxford on 10 February 1945)
• The Sermon and the Lunch (first published in The Church of England Newspaper on 21 September 1945)
• Scraps (first published in St James Magazine, December 1945)
• After Priggery – What? (first published in The Spectator on 7 December 1945)
• Man or Rabbit? (leaflet of the Student Christian Movement in Schools, 1946)
• ‘The Trouble With “X”…’ (first published in Bristol Diocesan Gazette in August 1948)
• On Living in an Atomic Age (first published in Informed Reading, No. 6, 1948)
• Lilies That Fester (first published in Twentieth Century, Vol. 157, April 1955)
• Good Work and Good Works (first published in The Catholic Art Quarterly, Vol. 23, Christmas 1959)
• A Slip of the Tongue (C.S. Lewis’s last sermon, preached at the chapel of Magdalene College, Cambridge at Evensong on 29 January 1956)
• We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’ (first published in The Saturday Evening Post on 28 December 1963)
• Christian Reunion (probably written in 1944)
• Priestesses in the Church? (first published in Time and Tide on 14 August 1948)
• On Church Music (first published in English Church Music, Vol. 19, April 1949)

Letters

• The Conditions for a Just War (letter in Theology, No. 30, May 1939)
• The Conflict in Anglican Theology (letter in Theology, No. 41, November 1940)
• Miracles (letter in The Guardian on 16 October 1942)
• Mr C.S. Lewis on Christianity (letter in The Listener on 9 March 1944)
• A Village Experience (letter in The Guardian on 31 August 1945)
• Correspondence with an Anglican Who Dislikes Hymns (letter in The Presbyter, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1948)
• The Church’s Liturgy, Invocation and Invocation of Saints (letters in Church Times on 20 May, 1 July, 15 July, and 5 August 1949)
• The Holy Name (letter in Church Times on 10 August 1951)
• Mere Christians (letter in Church Times on 8 February 1952)
• Canonization (letter in Church Times on 24 October 1952)
• Version Vernacular (letter in The Christian Century on 31 December 1958)
• Capital Punishment and Death Penalty (letters in Church Times on 1 and 15 December 1961)

From his first broadcasts over the BBC in August 1941, C.S. Lewis is inundated with letters. As he gains more readers, the pile of letters grows larger, especially after the publication of his books The Screwtape Letters and Miracles in America in February 1943 and September 1947. The 8 September 1947 issue of Time Magazine features Lewis on its cover, with an article inside about C.S. Lewis as one of the growing band of intellectuals who came to believe in God. As a result, Lewis receives a great many letters and parcels with gifts from American admirers. Many gifts are shared with others outside The Kilns. Answering all the letters would have been impossible without the help of Lewis’s brother, Warren. In the afternoon of 7 June 1962, Lewis gives tea to a young man from North Carolina, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), who is teaching at the University of Kentucky. They have been corresponding since 1954. During the following weeks, Lewis meets Hooper a lot at The Kilns, and he takes him along to the meeting of the Inklings. Lewis asks Hooper to be his personal secretary because there are hundreds of letters to respond to. After Lewis’s death, Hooper becomes a biographer of Lewis and the collector and editor of his writings. Lewis’s correspondence is published between 2000 and 2007 in the three volumes of C.S. Lewis. Collected Letters, edited by Walter Hooper.

From his first broadcasts over the BBC in August 1941, C.S. Lewis is inundated with letters. As he gains more readers, the pile of letters grows larger, especially after the publication of his books The Screwtape Letters and Miracles in America in February 1943 and September 1947. The 8 September 1947 issue of Time Magazine features Lewis on its cover, with an article inside about C.S. Lewis as one of the growing band of intellectuals who came to believe in God. As a result, Lewis receives a great many letters and parcels with gifts from American admirers. Many gifts are shared with others outside The Kilns. Answering all the letters would have been impossible without the help of Lewis’s brother, Warren. In the afternoon of 7 June 1962, Lewis gives tea to a young man from North Carolina, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), who is teaching at the University of Kentucky. They have been corresponding since 1954. During the following weeks, Lewis meets Hooper a lot at The Kilns, and he takes him along to the meeting of the Inklings. Lewis asks Hooper to be his personal secretary because there are hundreds of letters to respond to. After Lewis’s death, Hooper becomes a biographer of Lewis and the collector and editor of his writings. Lewis’s correspondence is published between 2000 and 2007 in the three volumes of C.S. Lewis. Collected Letters, edited by Walter Hooper.

C.S. Lewis loved the Latin epic poem Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC). The poem tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. During his life, Lewis worked on a translation of the poem. This book, edited by A.T. Reyes, a teacher of Greek and Latin at Groton School, Massachusetts, gives Lewis’s surviving translation, preceded by an extensive introduction by the editor.

This collection, edited by former secretary and biographer of C.S. Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), contains the following pieces:

Essays

• The Idea of an ‘English School’ (paper for a joint meeting of the Classical and English Associations at Oxford)
• Our English Syllabus (address to a group of Oxford undergraduates)
• Image and imagination
• Oliver Elton (1861–1945): an obituary
• What France Means to Me
• Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886–1945): an obituary
• Lucretius
• The English Prose Morte

Reviews

• Arundell Esdaile, The Sources of English Literature (1929)
• W.P. Ker, Form and Style in Poetry: Lectures and Notes, ed. R. W. Chambers (1928)
• Denis de Rougemont, Poetry and Society(1940)& Claude Chavasse, The Bride of Christ (1940)
• Howard Rollin Patch, The Other World, According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (1950)
• Werner Schwarz, Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation (1955)
• Tragic Ends: George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (1961)
• Eros on the Loose: David Loth, The Erotic in Literature (1962)
• Who Gave Me Drink?: Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age (1944)
• G.A.L. Burgeon (Owen Barfield), This Ever Diverse Pair (1950)
• A World for Children: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (1937)
• Professor Tolkien’s hobbit: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (1937)
• The Gods Return to Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
• The Dethronement of Power: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (1954) and The Return of the King (1955)
• A Sacred Poem: Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres (1938)
• Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres (1945)
• A Lectionary of Christian Prose from the Second Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. A. C. Bouquet (1939)
• The Oxford Book of Christian Verse, ed. Lord David Cecil (1940)
• Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (1941)
• Selected Sermons: A Selection from the Occasional Sermons of Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, ed. Evelyn Waugh (1949)
• Odysseus Sails Again: The Odyssey, translation Robert Fitzgerald (1962)
• Ajax and Others: John Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (1962)
• T.R. Henn, Longinus and English Criticism (1934)
• Helen M. Barrett, Boethius: Some Aspects of his Times and Work (1940)
• Ruth Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1933)
• J.W.H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase (1943)
• Arthuriana: Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative Study, ed. R.S. Loomis (1959)
• Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, with introduction, translation, and notes by John Jay Parry (1941)
• Rhyme and Reason: Dorothy L. Sayers, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement (1963)
• Alan M.F. Gunn, The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of The Romance of the Rose (1952)
• Leone Ebreo, The Philosophy of Love (Dialoghi d’Amore), translation J.  Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes, and introduction Cecil Roth (1937)
• E.K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933)
• M. Pauline Parker, The Allegory of the Faerie Queene (1960)
• John Vyvyan, Shakespeare and the Rose of Love (1960)
• Logan Pearsall Smith, Milton and his Modern Critics (1940)
• Douglas Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time: Some Comments (1945)
• H.W. Garrod, Collins (1928)
• Hugh Kingsmill, Matthew Arnold (1928)
• Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (1928)
• Boswell’s Bugbear: Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bertram Hylton Davis (1961)
• Poetry and Exegesis: Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1962)
• The Sagas and Modern Life – Morris, Mr Yeats, and the originals: Dorothy M. Hoare, The Works of Morris and of Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature (1937)
• Haggard Rides Again: Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (1960)

Other

• Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C.S. Lewis (1947)
• Preface to Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments (1955)
• Preface to Austin Farrer, A Faith of Our Own (1960)
• Introduction to Selections from Layamon’s Brut, ed. G. L. Brook (1963)

This collection of C.S. Lewis’s poetry in one volume, including many previously unpublished poems, is edited by Don W. King, Professor of English at Montreat College in North Carolina. The collection, with the poems arranged in chronological order, contains the following poems:

Poems 1907–1914

• The Old Gray Mare
• Descend to Earth, Descend, Celestial Nine
• Quam Bene Saturno
• Carpe Diem
• In Winter When the Frosty Nights Are Long
• Loki Bound
• Ovid’s “Pars estis pauci”

Poems 1915–1919

• My Western Garden
• A Death Song
• The Hills of Down
• Against Potpourri
• To the Gods of Old Time
• The Town of Gold
• The Wood Desolate (near Bookham)
• Anamnesis
• A Prelude
• Ballade of a Winter’s Morning
• Sonnet to John Keats
• Yet More of the Wood Desolate
• The Wind
• New Year’s Eve
• Laus Mortis
• In His Own Image
• Sonnet
• Loneliness
• The Little Golden Statuette
• Sonnet
• Sonnet to Sir Philip Sydney
• Exercise on an Old Theme
• Of Ships
• Couplets
• Hylas
• Decadence
• MHΔÈN ’ÁTAN
• Ballade on a Certain Pious Gentleman
• L’Envoy
• Circe – A Fragment
• Exercise
• Despoina, Bear With Me
• Poems from Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919)

Poems 1920–1925

• Oh That a Black Ship
• Heart-Breaking School
• And After This They Send Me to Another Place
• Old Kirk, Like Father Time Himself
• The Carpet Rises in the Draught
• The Tale of Psyche Is Unjustly Told
• The Silence of the Night
• West Germanic to Primitive Old English

Poems 1926

• Dymer (1926)

Poems 1927–1934

• The Lord Is a Jealous God – A Careful Shepherd
• The Hedgehog Moralised
• Thus Æ to Ĕ
• Artless and Ignorant Is Andvāri
• Long at Lectures
• Save Yourself. Run and Leave Me. I Must Go Back
• I Woke from a Fool’s Dream, to Find All Spent
• Essence
• He Whom I Bow To
• You Rest Upon Me All My Days
• My Heart Is Empty
• Thou Only Art Alternative to God
• God in His Mercy Made
• Nearly They Stood Who Fall
• I Have Scraped Clean the Plateau
• Because of Endless Pride
• Iron Will Eat the World’s Old Beaty Up
• Quick! The Black, Sulphurous, Never Quenched
• When Lilith Means to Draw Me
• Once the Worm-laid Egg Broke in the Wood
• I Have Come Back with Victory Got
• I Am Not One that Easily Flits Past in Thought
• Passing To-Day by a Cottage, I Shed Tears
• I Know Not, I
• The Shortest Way Home
• They Tell Me, Lord that When I Seem
• Set on the Soul’s Acropolis the Reason Stands
• Abecedarium Philosophicum
• You, Beneath Scraping Branches
• In a Spring Season I Sailed Away
• I Will Write Down the Portion that I Understand
• When the Year Dies in Preparation for the Birth
• The Queen of Drum
• Scholar’s Melancholy

Poems 1935–1949

• The Examiner Sits into Quarrie
• Where Reservoys Ripple
• The Planets
• Sonnet
• Coronation March
• After Kirby’s Kalevala
• Where Are the Walks?
• The Future of Forestry
• Chanson D’Aventure
• Experiment
• To Mr. Roy Campbell
• Hermione in the House of Paulina
• How Can I Ask Thee, Father
• Break, Sun, My Crusted Earth
• The World Is Round
• Arise My Body
• The Floating Islands
• Out of the Wound We Pluck
• Epitaph
• The Apologist’s Evening Prayer
• To G.M.
• The Admiral Stamped on the Quarter Deck
• Awake, My Lute!
• A Funny Old Man Had a Habit
• The Salamander
• Best Quality Sackcloth & Ashes
• From the Latin of Milton’s De Idea Platonica Quemadmodum Aristoteles Intellexit
• On the Death of Charles Williams
• This Literary Lion
• Under Sentence
• On the Atomic Bomb (Metrical Experiment)
• On Receiving Bad News
• Consolation
• The Birth of Language
• On Being Human
• Solomon
• The True Nature of Gnomes
• Dangerous Oversight
• Call Him a Fascist? Thus the Rabbit
• The Small Man Orders His Wedding
• Two Kinds of Memory
• Le Roi S’Amuse
• Donkeys’ Delight
• The End of the Wine
• Vitrea Circe
• Epitaph
• The Sailing of the Ark
• Late Summer
• The Landing
• The Turn of the Tide
• The Prodigality of Firdausi
• Epitaph in a Village Churchyard
• On a Picture by Chirico
• Adam at Night
• Arrangement of Pindar
• Epitaph
• Conversation Piece: The Magician and the Dryad
• The Day with a White Mark
• A Footnote to Pre-History

Poems 1950–1963

• As One Oldster to Another
• A Cliché Came Out of Its Cage
• Not for Your Reading, Not Because I Dream
• Ballade of Dead Gentlemen
• The Country of the Blind
• I Know Far Less of Spiders
• Pilgrim’s Problem
• Travellers! In Months without an R
• Interim Report
• Vowels and Sirens
• Impenitence
• March for Drum, Trumpet, and Twenty-one Giants
• D.H. Lawrence, Dr. Stopes
• Evolutionary Hymn
• To Mr. Kingsley Amis on His Late Verses
• Ichabod
• Odora Canum Vis: A defence of certain modern biographers and critics
• Cradle-Song Based on a Theme from Nicolas of Cusa
• Spartan Nactus
• Dear Dorothy, I’m Puzzling Hard
• On Another Theme from Nicolas of Cusa
• Legion
• After Aristotle
• Who Knows if the Isolation, the Compact, the Firm-shaped
• Nan est Doctior Omnibus Puellis
• Epanorthosis (for the end of Goethe’s Faust)
• Experempment
• Aubade
• Lords Coëval with Creation
• An Expostulation
• Oh Doe Not Die
• One Happier Look on Your Kind, Suffering Face
• All This Is Flashy Rhetoric about Loving You
• Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman
• Dear Mr. Marshall, Thank You
• Re-Adjustment

Undated Poems

• The Ecstasy
• The Saboteuse
• Prelude to Space: An Epithalamium
• On a Vulgar Error
• Lines During a General Election
• You Do Not Love the Bourgeoisie
• Dear Roy – Why Should Each Wowzer on the List
• Infatuation
• Aubade
• To Andrew Marvell
• Lines Written in a Copy of Milton’s Work
• Through Our Lives Thy Meshes Run
• Such Natural Love Twixt Beast and Man
• When the Grape of the Night Is Pressed
• Till Your Alchemic Beams Turn All to Gold
• These Faint Wavering Far-travell’d Gleams
• The Phoenix Flew into My Garden
• The Nativity
• Love’s as Warm as Tears
• Yes, You Are Always Everywhere
• Stephen to Lazarus
• Five Sonnets
• Now That Night Is Creeping
• Lady, to This Fair Beast I Know but One
• Have You Not Seen that in Our Days
• Strange that a Trick of Light and Shade Could Look
• If We Had Remembered
• Spirit? Who Names Her Lies
• All Things
• Lady, a Better Sculptor Far
• Erected by Sorrowing Brothers
• Here Lies One Kind of Speech
• An Age Will Come
• As Long as Rolling Wheels Rotate
• But in All Dialects
• Fidelia Vulnera Amantis
• Finchley Avenue
• Go Litel Tugge upon thes Watres Shene
• If with Posterity Good Fame
• Laertes to Napoleon
• Lines to Mr. Compton Mackenzie
• Of This Great Suit Who Dares Foresee the End?
• That Was an Ugly Age
• The Goodly Fair
• To Mrs. Dyson, Angrie
• Tu Silentia Perosus
• YAH!