Jack at home: recommended resources
Books
For Lewis’s own works, consult “Spending a pleasant hour with C. S. Lewis,” pp. 16–18. Some good biographies of Lewis include George Sayer, Jack (1988); Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis (2003); Alan Jacobs, The Narnian (2008); Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life (2005); Devin Brown, A Life Observed (2013); and Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis—A Life (2013). Recollections of Lewis by his friends are gathered into Remembering C. S. Lewis (2005), edited by James Como—also known as C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (1979, 1992)—and Lewis’s friends themselves are the subject of Colin Duriez, C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Friendship (2013). It may be hard to get your hands on the three-volume Collected Letters of Lewis (2004–2007) edited by Walter Hooper, but the search is worth the reward! See images of the places Lewis knew in Walter Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond (1982) and Douglas Gilbert and Clyde Kilby, C. S. Lewis: Images of His World (2005).
Guides to reading Lewis include Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life & Works (1998) and Joel Heck, The C. S. Lewis Reader’s Encyclopedia (1998). Academic companions to his work include Bruce Edwards’s four-volume C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (2007) and Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward, editors, Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (2010).
Jack Lewis’s childhood is covered in Ronald Bres-land, The Backward Glance: C. S. Lewis and Ireland (1999); Sandy Smith, C. S. Lewis and the Island of His Birth (2013); and Harry Poe, Becoming C. S. Lewis (2019); read the Boxen stories Jack and Warnie wrote together in Boxen: Childhood Chronicles Before Narnia (1985). For Jack Lewis’s friendship with Arthur Greeves, consult the Collected Letters or They Stand Together (1979), Hooper’s first compilation of Lewis’s letters to Greeves. Read more on Lewis’s journey from atheism to fame as an apologist in David Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert (2002) and Harry Poe, The Making of C. S. Lewis (2021).
For details of Warren Lewis’s life, look at Brothers and Friends (1982), edited by Clyde Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead. Warnie wrote seven books on seventeenth-century France, of which the most famous is The Splendid Century (1953). Two biographies of Joy Davidman are And God Came In (1983) by Lyle Dorsett and Joy (2015) by Abigail Santamaria; Davidman’s story was also novelized in Becoming Mrs. Lewis (2018) by Patti Callahan. (For Davidman’s writings, see p. 40). Douglas Gresham wrote of his own life, including his childhood with Joy and Jack, in Lenten Lands (1988).
Many books set Lewis explicitly in the context of his friendships with the Inklings and other colleagues. Among them are Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (1978); Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1989), edited by G. B. Tennyson; Colin Duriez and David Porter, The Inklings Handbook (2001); Colin Duriez, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship (2003); Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep (2007) and Bandersnatch (2015); Harry Poe, The Inklings of Oxford (2009); Philip and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship (2015); and Gina Dalfonzo, Dorothy and Jack (2020).
Finally, hundreds of books cover aspects of Lewis’s life and thought from a literary or theological perspective. See the Internet links below for help in navigating the landscape.
Christian History issues
Read past issues on our website—some are still available for purchase:
Our Advent devotional, The Grand Miracle, features readings from Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Sayers, Barfield, Chesterton, MacDonald, and Davidman. Order some for this Advent!
Videos from Vision Video
Videos on the theme of this issue include Affectionately Yours, Screwtape; Christian Catalyst Collection: Douglas Gresham; C. S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert; The Fantasy Makers; The Life and Faith of C. S. Lewis; Points of Light; Shadowlands (the BBC version); The Shortest Way Home; and Through a Lens Darkly.
Websites
Sites aplenty are devoted to Lewis—study centers, local Lewis societies, individual scholars, and fan sites galore. Here is a small fraction of them.
The Marion E. Wade Center played a special role in this issue’s production; its resources can be browsed on the Wheaton College website. Taylor University also has a prominent center devoted to the study of “Lewis and Friends.” You can find a trove of information at the C. S. Lewis Institute. The official website of Harper Collins’s editions of Lewis’s books is cslewis.com (with a companion site devoted to Narnia at Narnia.com). The C. S. Lewis Foundation, which maintains The Kilns as a study center, is at cslewis.org. (Consult its featured links section as a guide to other resources.) See short descriptions and covers of all of Lewis’s books at The Disorded Image. Some journals and newsletters devoted to the study of Lewis include Seven, Sehnsucht, and the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. Mythlore publishes articles on Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams.
Some scholars’ sites may particularly help those first exploring the world of Lewis studies. Diana Pavlac Glyer maintains a bibliography of book-length studies of Lewis at dianaglyer.com. Joel Heck has a detailed chronology (more than 1,300 pages!) of Lewis’s life at joelheck.com. Andrew Lazo has some guides to Lewis available at mythoflove.net. Brenton Dickieson blogs about the Inklings at A Pilgrim in Narnia. CH
By the editors
[Christian History originally published this article in Christian History Issue #140 in 2021]
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