C. S. Lewis has several reputations. He was an important and respected critic and literary scholar, specializing in medieval and Renaissance English literature. To the public he has been well known for forty years as an expositor and defender of Christian beliefs. And in his remarkably varied canon--drama and biography are the only genres to which he made no contribution--there is fiction in sufficient amount, and of sufficient interest, to give him considerable standing as a novelist.

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast into the comfortable household of Albert James Lewis, a solicitor, and Flora Augusta Hamilton Lewis. His mother died when he was nine years old; his only sibling, three years his senior, was Warren Hamilton Lewis (1895-1973), the author of The Splendid Century (1953) and other works on seventeenth-and eighteenth-century France. C. S. Lewis attended several schools in Belfast and in England, but the most important...