Originally an English literary historian and critic at Oxford University, C. S. Lewis became one the best remembered English authors and apologists for the Christian faith in the 20th Cent.
Jack, as he was known to his friends, grew up in Ireland in a home full of books. Jack and his older brother Warren grew astranged from their father, who never quite recovered from the death of Jack's mother—when he was ten—and home life was never warm or satisfying afterwards. When Warren left for college, Jack grew more alone and, under the influence of his school matron, became an atheist in his middle teens.
At age 19 C. S. Lewis went for Oxford, and never really left (even when he was teaching at Cambridge between 1955 and 1963, he would return on the weekends to find refuge in its comfort). In 1924 he became a tutor in the university and was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College the next year. By then he had already began publishing, though under the pseudonym of Clive Hamiltan.
The death of a friend, Paddy Moore, in the WW1 brought him into contact with the Moore's mother and sister, and he began to share a lodging with them soon after his graduation so that he could better care for them. His encounter with Mrs Moore's brother, who, on a visit to the Moore's, had a severe attack of a combat-induced nervous disorder and died in extreme mental tortures, began to shake Lewis's intellectual materialism. His atheism was further challenged afterwards by reading the works of George MacDonald and G. K. Chesterton, as well as the personal friendship of Owen Barfield and Nevill Coghill. In 1929 C. S. Lewis accepted the reality of God's sovereign existence and surrendered his life to Christ.
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