| Category: | History & Biography |
| Format: | Hardcover w/ Jacket |
| Page Count: | 312 |
| Size: | 5.5 in x 8.5 in |
| Weight: | 17.84 ounces |
| ISBN-10: | 1-4335-6273-1 |
| ISBN-13: | 978-1-4335-6273-0 |
| ISBN-UPC: | 9781433562730 |
| Case Quantity: | 18 |
| Published: | November 12, 2019 |
During his youth, the boy who would become C. S. Lewis formed his most basic impressions and tastes regarding music, art, literature, religion, sports, friendship, imagination, education, war, and more. The issues young “Jack” Lewis wrestled with drove him toward the foundation on which his life would be built. His childhood interests, influences, longings, struggles, and even failures prepared him to engage his gifts as a writer, teacher, and friend.
Lewis expert Harry Lee Poe unfolds young Jack’s key relationships, hobbies, spiritual conflicts, decisions, desires, and dreams. Along the way, Poe points out where these themes reappear in Lewis’s later works—bringing to life the importance of his conversion and his surprising discovery of joy.
Author:
Harry Lee Poe (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the author of twenty books, including The Inklings of Oxford and C. S. Lewis Remembered, as well as numerous articles on Lewis and the Inklings. Poe hosts the annual Inklings Weekend in Montreat, North Carolina, and is a regular speaker on Lewis at universities and other venues worldwide. He served as the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University, where he has taught a course on C. S. Lewis for over twenty years.
Product Details
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
- Young Jack Lewis at Wynyard School: 1908–1910
- Off to Malvern: 1910–1914
- Making a Friend: Spring 1914
- Jack and War Come to Great Bookham: Fall 1914
- Reading for Kirkpatrick and for Pleasure: 1914
- War and Romance: 1915
- A Conflicted Soul: 1916
- Oxford and War: 1917–19189
- The End of Youth
Notes
Index
Endorsements
“Harry Lee Poe’s biography of Lewis’s early years is an engaging book filled with glimpses of the celebrated author that cannot be found in any other biography of Lewis.”
Lyle W. Dorsett, Director Emeritus, Marion E. Wade Center; Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism Emeritus, Beeson Divinity School; author, And God Came In and Seeking the Secret Place
“‘The Child is father of the Man.’ Anyone who doubts this observation by Wordsworth should read this excellent new biography of C. S. Lewis. Poe goes into great depth, drawing heavily on unpublished sources, recounting the first two decades of Lewis’s life in splendid detail. Even seasoned readers of Lewis will find much that is new and illuminating in this readable biography.”
David C. Downing, Codirector, Marion E. Wade Center
“A unique coming-of-age biography of C. S. Lewis that stands out in revealing how his early life shaped the future Lewis: body, mind, and soul. It vividly captures the whole person of Lewis—not only an aspect of him but also the variety and depth of his defining features. The result is an eye-opening, important, and rich portrait that benefits from the teeming knowledge and thorough research of the author. It includes the often-neglected, lasting significance of the people who impacted the often-solitary young Lewis, with illuminating flash-forwards to the future Lewis.”
Colin Duriez, author, C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Friendship and Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship
“Harry Lee Poe’s Becoming C. S. Lewis breaks new ground in the study of Lewis’s life. Specifically, Poe concentrates on the early years of Lewis’s life—an area largely neglected or glossed over by other biographers—and explores in rich detail the people, ideas, and experiences that shaped Lewis’s adult life. Mining the fertile cache of material available in the Lewis Papers—the eleven-volume archive compiled by Lewis’s brother, Warren—Poe offers convincing arguments about how Lewis’s earliest interests find expression in his adult writings. The themes found later in Lewis’s magisterial works had their inception in Lewis’s youthful writings, particularly in his lifelong correspondence with his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves. Readers intent on obtaining a deeper understanding of the most important Christian writer of the last hundred years will find Becoming C. S. Lewis a welcomed treasure trove.”
Don King, author, C. S. Lewis, Poet; Plain to the Inward Eye; and The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis
“Many fans of C. S. Lewis will savor having so much detail on his early years gathered together in one biography. This portrait of an artist as a young man is based on remarkably rich information that we have concerning Lewis’s formative experiences and influences. Harry Lee Poe adds much helpful context and commentary.”
George M. Marsden, author, C. S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”: A Biography
“Wordsworth famously wrote, ‘The Child is father of the Man.’ To better understand C. S. Lewis’s tremendous achievements later in life—as a writer of imaginative fiction and poetry, a literary critic, and a Christian apologist—we should look to his formative years. Harry Lee Poe’s Becoming C. S. Lewis is a valuable contribution to biographies of Lewis, providing a rich and comprehensive look at Lewis’s early years and his important relationships with figures such as his brother, Warren Lewis, his friend Arthur Greeves, and his tutor W. T. Kirkpatrick.”
Holly Ordway, Professor of English, Houston Baptist University; author, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination
“The young Jack Lewis is the Lewis whom all admirers of the mature C. S. Lewis need to know. We find it highly fitting, then, that Harry Lee Poe, who has long been a devoted guide to Lewis and the Inklings, has chosen to illuminate for us so faithfully the ardent youth who was father to the man.”
Carol and Philip Zaleski, coauthors, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings