In October 1945, C.S. Lewis wrote a slightly grumpy reply to someone asking him to do a book on Christianity, in plain language, specifically for workers. Since giving a series of wartime BBC lectures on the faith’s basics, Lewis had become a kind of Christian Answer Man, and frankly, he had other ambitions and projects. “I am nearly 47,” he complained. “Where are my successors?”
“It’s interesting,” says Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian (HarperSanFrancisco), a new Lewis biography, “that 60 years later, nobody has really turned up.” Lewis, whose day job was Oxford medievalist, did eventually get around to other work, including seven children’s books about a place called Narnia. Ninety-five million Narnia books have been sold since then, and as Disney begins test screenings for its December release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on the series’ first volume, the septet is back near the top of the children’s best-seller lists.
Yet Lewis’ popularity extends beyond the Borders children’s section. This year HarperSanFrancisco, which publishes some of the best known of his dozens of adult titles, including Mere Christianity (a collection of those radio talks) and The Screwtape Letters (a set of funny-creepy faux missives from a senior devil to his nephew), sold 843,000 copies, twice as many as in 2001. Multiple books about Lewis debut annually; this year’s crop features Jacobs’ biography and Jack’s Life (Broadman & Holman) by Lewis’ stepson Douglas Gresham. In 1947, a TIME cover story hailed Lewis as “one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.” Now, 58 years later (and 42 after his death, in 1963), he could arguably be called the hottest theologian of 2005.
