In his erudite new biography of Clive Staples Lewis, Alan Jacobs estimates that from 1949 to 1955, Lewis wrote 600,000 words of prose (not counting work on his book on 16th-century literature).
In anticipation of the new movie “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Harper Collins is releasing all of them, and then some. One hundred and seventy books on, by, or about the famous author and defender of Christianity are being pumped into 60 countries in time for the Dec. 9 premiere.
It’s a stack tall enough to give even the most voracious bookworm vertigo. The result, though, is that readers can satisfy their taste for almost any aspect of Lewis’s life, letters, or arcana (the “Narnia Cookbook,” anyone?). Among the cascade of books are three new biographies of Lewis that share a Christian perspective, but are very different in their approach.
The Narnian, by Professor Jacobs of Illinois’s Wheaton College, which houses Lewis’s papers, is the most impressive, and is designed for readers who want to get to know Lewis the scholar and theologian.
Jacobs says he’s less interested in what Lewis (who was known to all as “Jack”) did on any given day, than in “the life of the mind, the story of an imagination.” While he follows a chronological format through Lewis’s childhood, the early death of his mother, schooling, and service in World War I, once Lewis is ensconced as a don at Oxford, Jacobs jumps around to themes that most interest him.