Clive Staples("Jack" to his friends and family)Lewis (b. Nov. 29, 1898, Belfast, Ire. [now in Northern Ireland]--d. Nov. 22, 1963, Oxford, Oxfordshire, Eng.), British scholar, novelist, and author of about 40 books

He was one of two sons of Albert and Flora Lewis. His mother died when he was ten. His father placed Lewis in a boarding school where he joined his older brother, Warren.Both boys endured horrendous conditions at the school where the headmaster was prone to fits of rage. Lewis writes, "If the school had not died, and if I had been left there two years more, it would probably have sealed my fate as a scholar for good."After the school closed, Lewis entered Malvern Cherbourg School in England and later Malvern College. Once again the negative effects of Malvern were great. And after asking to be removed from the school, Lewis was placed under the instructional care of W. T. Kirkpatrick, whom Lewis called "a hard satirical atheist."

Kirkpatrick saw strong potential in Lewis and informed Albert Lewis that his son could be a writer or a scholar "but you'll not make anything else of him." Realizing Kirkpatrick's assessment was true, Lewis applied for and received a scholarship to University College, the oldest of the Oxford colleges.

During World War I, Lewis fought in France and was wounded in 1917. The following year he went to University College, Oxford, where he achieved an outstanding record as a classical scholar. From 1925 to 1954 he was a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College,Oxford, and from 1954 to 1963 he was professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge.

Lewis was an atheist but then started to believe there was a God and after a long struggle and with the help of some friends he came to believe in Christ in 1931.

Lewis met Joy Davidman Gresham in 1952 and they were married in 1956. She had two sons David and Douglas. They knew when they got married that she had cancer. They had a very happy but short marriage. She died in 1960.

In the fall of 1996 The magazine Christianity Today published an issue celebrating there 40th anniversary. One of the articles in that issue was one focused on which author had influenced evangelicals the most over that time. The article says, in part; "It is perhaps fair to say, however, that one author's books indisputably affected American evangelicals during this period more than did Francis Schaeffer's-or those of any of the other authors mentioned above. And that author was neither American nor quintessentially evangelical.I mean, of course, C. S. Lewis.