The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis, Don Giovanni Calabria (Joint Author), Martin Moynihan (Editor)

Overview

In September 1947, after reading The Screwtape Letters in Italian, Fr. GiovanniCalabria was moved to write the author, but he knew no English, so he addressed his letter in Latin. Therein began a correspondence that was to outlive Fr. Calabria himself (he died in December 1954 and was succeeded in the correspondence by Fr. Luigi Pedrollo). Translator/editor Martin Moynihan calls these letters Alimpid, fluent and deeply refreshing. There was a charm about them, too, and not least in the way they were >topped and tailed= B that is, in their ever-slightly-varied formalities of address and of farewell. More than any other of his published works, The Latin Letters shows the strong devotional side of Lewis, and contains letters on topics ranging from Christian unity and modern European history to liturgical worship and general ethical behavior. Moreover, these letters are often intimate and personal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781890318345
Publisher:	St. Augustine's Press
Publication date:	11/28/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	126
Sales rank:	397,159
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

C. S. Lewis was famous both as a fiction writer and as a Christian thinker, and his biographers and critics sometimes divide his personality in two: the storyteller and the moral educator, the "dreamer" and the "mentor." Yet a large part of Lewis's appeal, for both his audiences, lay in his ability to fuse imagination with instruction. "Let the pictures tell you their own moral," he once advised writers of children's stories. "But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in. ... The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind."

Storytelling came naturally to Lewis, who spent the rainy days of his childhood in Ireland writing about an imaginary world he called Boxen. His first published novel, Out of the Silent Planet, tells the story of a journey to Mars; its hero was loosely modeled on his friend and fellow Cambridge scholar J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis enjoyed some popularity for his Space Trilogy (which continues in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength), but nothing compared to that which greeted his next imaginative journey, to an invented world of fauns, dwarfs, and talking animals -- a world now familiar to millions of readers as Narnia.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, began as "a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood," according to Lewis. Years after that image first formed in his mind, others bubbled up to join it, producing what Kate Jackson, writing in Salon, called "a fascinating attempt to compress an almost druidic reverence for wild nature, Arthurian romance, Germanic folklore, the courtly poetry of Renaissance England and the fantastic beasts of Greek and Norse mythology into an entirely reimagined version of what's tritely called 'the greatest story ever told.'"

The Chronicles of Narnia was for decades the world's bestselling fantasy series for children. Although it was eventually superseded by Harry Potter, the series still holds a firm place in children's literature and the culture at large. (Narnia even crops up as a motif in Jonathan Franzen's 2001 novel The Corrections). Its last volume appeared in 1955; in that same year, Lewis published a personal account of his religious conversion in Surprised by Joy. The autobiography joined his other nonfiction books, including Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce, as an exploration of faith, joy and the meaning of human existence.

Lewis's final work of fiction, Till We Have Faces, came out in 1956. Its chilly critical reception and poor early sales disappointed Lewis, but the book's reputation has slowly grown; Lionel Adey called it the "wisest and best" of Lewis's stories for adults. Lewis continued to write about Christianity, as well as literature and literary criticism, for several more years. After his death in 1963, The New Yorker opined, "If wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to passage through the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels."

Date of Birth:

November 29, 1898

Date of Death:

November 22, 1963

Place of Birth:

Belfast, Nothern Ireland

Place of Death:

Headington, England

Education:

Oxford University 1917-1923; Elected fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1925

Website:

http://www.cslewisclassics.com