Today is C.S. Lewis' birthday

Nov. 29 is the birthday of the writer who said: 'When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.' That's C.S. Lewis, born in Belfast (1898), the author of the seven-volume children's series The Chronicles of Narnia, which begins with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the story of four children sent away from London because of wartime air raids. He also said, 'Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.'


As a teenager, he went off to boarding school in England. He hated it there. He said that English accents sounded to him like the 'voices of demons.' Worst of all was the landscape; he first looked at it and in that moment, he said, 'conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal.' Also, he felt that his favorite poet, W.B. Yeats, -- 'an author exactly after [his] own heart' -- was totally underappreciated in England. He wrote to a friend: 'Perhaps his appeal is purely Irish -- if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish.' But despite all his disdain and contempt for England, he chose to live and teach at Oxford University for almost 30 years -- while acquainting himself with other Irish people living in England as much as possible.

Besides fairy tales and children's classics, he wrote theological books, including The Screwtape Letters (1942), a novel in which a demon writes to his nephew; and The Great Divorce (1945), where residents of hell take a bus ride to heaven, and Mere Christianity (1952), based on talks he gave on the BBC during World War II.

C.S. Lewis said, 'Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.'