Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast. Bereaved of his mother at nine, gassed on the Somme at nineteen, and elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1925, he described himself in his twenties as "angry with God for not existing".
On the night of 19 September 1931 he walked Addison's Walk beside the Cherwell with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Tolkien argued that the gospel was "the true myth" — a story in the pattern of every dying-and-rising god legend Lewis loved, but one that had actually happened. Nine days later, on 28 September 1931, riding in the sidecar of his brother Warnie's motorcycle to Whipsnade Zoo, he silently gave in: "When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did."
His BBC wartime broadcasts (1941–44), later collected as Mere Christianity, made him the best-known lay theologian of the English-speaking twentieth century. The Chronicles of Narnia followed between 1950 and 1956 — seven children's books that have sold over 100 million copies.
Lewis died at his Oxford home, The Kilns, on 22 November 1963, aged 64 — one hour before John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas and on the same day Aldous Huxley died in Los Angeles. His memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey was unveiled fifty years later, on 22 November 2013.