The Fame of C. S. Lewis

This book considers the history of British literary scholar, author and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis’s fame from the 1940s through the present and compares his contrasting patterns of reception in Britain and America. Lewis was both an esteemed literary figure and a divisive personality among his colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, who recognized his penchant for projecting a persona. It took the outbreak of the Second World War and invitations from Christian leaders to draw Lewis into crafting popular Christian apologetics. Yet Lewis’s reasons for writing books that were accessible to a broad audience, including his children’s books, were rooted in a literary theory informed by his early reading life in Edwardian Belfast and his objections to literary modernism. The reception of Lewis’s popular works in America was shaped by the fact that American readers did not appreciate Lewis’s literary and cultural context. His posthumous fame, furthermore, should be accredited in part to factors independent of the qualities of his work: e.g. the publishing history of his books, the rise of visual media, the history of evangelicalism, and the manipulation of his legacy by the C. S. Lewis Estate. The evolution of rival portraits of Lewis as a Christian apologist and a children’s author is equally part of this story. Lewis’s platform as a contrarian Christian resisting modernity and his reactions to the intellectual, social, and religious changes of his day made the critical difference to his disparate transatlantic receptions.