Overview: Editorial Review

This reissue of a treasured classic offers a beautiful 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.