C. S. Lewis Timeline

Lewis was baptized on 29 January 1899 by his maternal grandfather in St Mark's Church, Dundela, in the Church of Ireland. According to his 1955 memoir Surprised by Joy, he later fell away from his faith during adolescence.

Lewis seems to have met J. R. R. Tolkien for the first time on 11 May 1926. Their friendship would prove pivotal to Lewis's intellectual and spiritual development.

Image source: J. R. R. Tolkien

In the Trinity Term of 1929, Lewis gave in and admitted that God was God, kneeling and praying — describing himself, perhaps, as 'the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.'

After his conversion to theism in 1929, Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931, following a long discussion during a late-night walk along Addison's Walk with his close friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

From 1941 Lewis spent his summer holiday weekends visiting Royal Air Force stations to speak on his faith, invited by Chaplain-in-Chief Maurice Edwards.

From 1941 to 1943 Lewis spoke on religious programmes broadcast by the BBC from London while the city was under periodic air raids, bringing Christian apologetics to a mass wartime audience.

Image source: Mere Christianity

In 1921 Lewis met the poet W. B. Yeats twice, since Yeats had moved to Oxford, an encounter that connected the young scholar to one of the great literary figures of the age.

Lewis's first novel after becoming a Christian was The Pilgrim's Regress (1933), which depicted his journey to Christianity in the allegorical style of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

Image source: The Pilgrim's Regress

His The Allegory of Love (1936) helped reinvigorate the serious study of late medieval narratives such as the Roman de la Rose, establishing Lewis's scholarly reputation.

Image source: The Allegory of Love

The Abolition of Man (1943), based on a series of lectures by Lewis at Durham University, defends objective value and the concept of natural law, presenting ideas also found in his science fiction trilogy.

Image source: The Abolition of Man

Written between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, The Chronicles of Narnia became Lewis's most popular work, selling over 100 million copies in 41 languages.

Image source: The Chronicles of Narnia

Lewis's last novel, Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, was published in 1956. That same year, the final Narnia novel, The Last Battle, won the Carnegie Medal.

Image source: Till We Have Faces

In 1924 Lewis became a philosophy tutor at University College, Oxford, marking the beginning of his formal academic career.

In 1925 Lewis was elected a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he served for 29 years until 1954.

Image source: Magdalen College, Oxford

During the wartime period Lewis was invited to become first President of the Oxford Socratic Club in January 1942, a position he enthusiastically held until resigning upon appointment to Cambridge in 1954.

In 1954 Lewis accepted the newly founded chair in Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he finished his career. He kept a home in Oxford and returned on weekends until his death.

Image source: Magdalene College, Cambridge

As his health declined again, Lewis resigned from his post at Cambridge in August 1963, ending a distinguished academic career spanning nearly four decades.

After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Lewises took child evacuees from London and other cities into The Kilns, their home near Oxford.

In 1956 Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman. They were married at the register office, 42 St Giles', Oxford, on 23 April 1956.

Image source: Joy Davidman

A church ceremony, performed by Peter Bide, took place at Joy Gresham's bed in the Churchill Hospital on 21 March 1957. Her cancer soon went into remission, and the couple lived together as a family with Warren Lewis.

In 1958 Lewis spent his honeymoon at the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn in Northern Ireland, which he called 'my Irish life', reconnecting with the land of his birth.

Earlier in 1960 the couple took a brief holiday in Greece and the Aegean — Lewis's only crossing of the English Channel after 1918. Joy's cancer recurred, and she died on 13 July 1960 at the age of 45.

In early June 1961 Lewis became afflicted with recurrent nephritis which progressed to chronic low-grade sepsis, causing him to miss the autumn term at Cambridge, though his health gradually improved through 1962.

Lewis collapsed in his bedroom at 5:30 pm on 22 November 1963, at age 64, and died a few minutes later of kidney failure. His death was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the same day.

Lewis was named on the last list of honours by George VI in December 1951 as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) but declined so as to avoid association with any political issues.

Lewis's brother Warren died on 9 April 1973 and was buried in the same grave as C. S. Lewis at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford.

Lewis Societies exist around the world, including one founded in Oxford in 1982, reflecting the enduring popularity of his writings across generations.

William Nicholson's screenplay Shadowlands (1985) dramatized Lewis's life and relationship with Joy Davidman Gresham. It was staged as a play starring Nigel Hawthorne in 1989 and made into a 1993 feature film starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

Image source: Shadowlands (1993 film)

Live-action film adaptations were made of three of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Prince Caspian (2008) and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).

Image source: The Chronicles of Narnia (film series)

In 2008 The Times ranked Lewis eleventh on their list of 'the 50 greatest British writers since 1945'. In 2000, Mere Christianity had been voted best book of the 20th century by Christianity Today.

On the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis was honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The dedication service included a reading from The Last Battle by Douglas Gresham, his younger stepson.

Image source: Poets' Corner

Mark St. Germain's 2009 play Freud's Last Session, imagining a meeting between Lewis aged 40 and Sigmund Freud aged 83 in London in 1939, was released as a film in 2023 starring Anthony Hopkins as Freud and Matthew Goode as Lewis.

Image source: Freud's Last Session