All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922 -1927.
Edited by Walter Hooper.
Foreword by Owen Barfield. With 8 pages of photographs.
Harcourt/Brace/Jovanovich. “The life of young C.S. Lewis was filled with
contemplations quite different from those of the mature Christian apologist and
well-known author, and this early diary--begun when Lewis was
twenty-three--provides readers an excellent window on his formative world. At
the time of these writings, Lewis was a student at Oxford with atheistic
convictions. Newly returned from the war, he filled his days with studies,
trips to the countryside, friendships, and, most interestingly, a home life
with Mrs. Moore, a woman twenty-six years his senior. Irish-born like Lewis,
Moore was the mother of a friend killed in the war, and she, her daughter
Maureen, and Lewis lived a frugal life together on the stipend passed along by
Lewis's father--who was unaware of the housekeeping arrangement.” – from the
back cover.
Ranking: Essential.
File Code: Diary. Biography. Softcover.
C. S. Lewis: Images of His World, by Douglas Gilbert and
Clyde S. Kilby.
“This reissue of a treasured classic offers a window into the
people and places that shaped the life of beloved author, scholar, and
apologist C. S. Lewis. In photographs and text (much of it in Lewis's own
words), Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby introduce us to such memorable
friends as J. R. R. Tolkien and transport us to such magical places as the deer
park outside Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford. We also meet Lewis as a
talented and brilliant child in Belfast, captivated by the myths and legends of
the North, already writing and illustrating imaginative stories and poems at a
young age. While the book includes an essay tracing Lewis's struggle to find
faith and a chronology of his life, it is not a biography per se but rather a
personal introduction, a composite portrait of a fascinating individual and the
world in which he lived. Attractively laid out in a fresh new format, this
volume will be prized both by longtime fans of Lewis and by those encountering
him for the first time.” – Amazon.
Ranking: Essential.
File Code: Album. Biography. Hardback.
C. S. Lewis and His World, by David Barratt.
Thin little book (for children? or people with not much
time?) on Lewis and his work, with a fair amount of pictures to help fill it
up.
Ranking: Keeper.
File Code: Biography. Hardback.
The Magic Never Ends: The Life and Work of C. S. Lewis, by
John Ryan Duncan.
“An Illustrated Profile of One of the Twentieth Century’s
Most Influential Writers”. A widely spaced book plumped out with lots of photos
and quotes in colored squares apart from the text. I always get books like this
in search of a new crumb of information or rare picture connected to Lewis. Not
bad, I imagine, if you don’t have all the other books about Lewis that I have.
Ranking: Keeper.
File Code: Biography. Hardback.
Letters of C. S. Lewis: Revised and Enlarged Edition. Edited
and with a Memoir by W. H. Lewis. Revised Edition Edited by Walter Hooper.
“The letters collected here cover a vast range of
subjects--books, nature, people, and every aspect of God and His world--and
extend from C.S. Lewis's early days as a student and atheist up to a few weeks
before his death. His correspondence with family, friends, and even fans,
offers readers an opportunity to share Lewis's wit and originality. Introduced
and edited by Walter Hooper, this volume represents an important revision to
the collection of Lewis's letters published in 1966: several letters have been
added, proper dates have been restored to some, correspondents' names to
others. And, as in the original volume, selected entries from Lewis's own diary
are included, as is Warnie Lewis's fascinating memoir of his brother's life.” - from the back cover. Harcourt/Brace.
Ranking: Essential.
File Code: Collected Letters. Biography.
They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur
Greeves (1914 – 1963), Edited by Walter Hooper.
Arthur Greeves was Lewis’s first great friend; they bonded
together over a love for Northern myths when Lewis was sent to visit him as a
neighborly duty. Through this correspondence of over fifty years, during which
Greeves remained in Ireland with Lewis visiting only now and then, they kept up
a friendship of deepest personal trust, with Lewis revealing his streak of
sadomasochism and Greeves his ‘uranism’, which Lewis neither condoned nor
judged. Lewis described Arthur as “after my brother, my oldest and most
intimate friend.”
Ranking: Essential.
File Code: Letters. Biography. Hardback.
Letters to an American Lady, by C. S. Lewis. Edited by Clyde
S. Kilby.
Eerdman’s. “On October 26, 1950, C. S. Lewis wrote the first
of more than a hundred letters he would send to a woman he had never met, but
with whom he was to maintain a correspondence for the rest of his life.
Ranging broadly in subject matter, the letters discuss topics as profound as
the love of God and as frivolous as preferences in cats. Lewis himself clearly
had no idea that these letters would ever see publication, but they reveal
facets of his character little known even to devoted readers of his fantasy and
scholarly writings -- a man patiently offering encouragement and guidance to
another Christian through the day-to-day joys and sorrows of ordinary life. Letters
to an American Lady stands as a fascinating and moving testimony to
the remarkable humanity and even more remarkable Christianity of C. S. Lewis
and is richly deserving of the position it now takes among the balance of his
Christian writings.” – Amazon. [Lacks this jacket.]
Ranking: Essential.
File Code: Collected Letters. Hardback.
Letters to Children, by C. S. Lewis. Edited by Lyle W.
Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead.
Forward by Douglas Gresham. Culled letters addressed
specifically to children, most often about Narnia but includes advice on faith
and life. “I have done lots of dish-washing and I have often been read to, but
I never thought of your very sensible idea of doing both together.”
Ranking: Essential.
File Code: Collected Letters. Softcover.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume I: Family
Letters 1905 -1931; The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II: Books,
Broadcasts and the War 1931 -1949; The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume
III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963; Edited by Walter Hooper.
The three heavy volumes that make obsolete all other books of
Lewis letters (though they remain handy for being ‘themed’). Almost literally
tons of letters, and all arranged in chronological order (except for a few
stray letters that were added in the third volume that had not been discovered
previously). Monumental; I have to give Hooper kudos for his labor.
Ranking: Essential.
File Code: Collected Letters. Biography. Hardbacks.
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