C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast on November 29, 1898, the son of a solicitor. He would go on to become one of the twentieth century's most influential writers, producing the seven-volume 'Chronicles of Narnia,' the science-fiction 'Space Trilogy,' and works of Christian apologetics like 'Mere Christianity,' while teaching medieval literature at Oxford and Cambridge.
Lewis grew up in a house crammed with books, in a family he later described as leaving him 'so much at home in the world of the imagination.' A childhood obsession with 'dressed animals' and 'knights-in-armour' fiction, combined with the early loss of his mother to cancer when he was nine, shaped the imaginative and melancholic sensibility that would later infuse his fiction.
After serving in the trenches of the First World War — wounded at the Battle of Arras in 1918 — Lewis returned to Oxford, where he became a formidable scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature and a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien within the informal group of writers known as the Inklings. Their long walks and pub conversations at the Eagle and Child helped shape both Tolkien's Middle-earth and Lewis's Narnia.
Lewis wrote 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' in 1949, reportedly inspired by an image that had lodged in his mind since 1939: a faun carrying an umbrella through a snowy wood. He died on November 22, 1963 — the same day as John F. Kennedy's assassination, which overshadowed his death in the press.