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What is remarkable is that in the midst of all his miseries, Lewis turned to the writing of a story for children. He was already famous, but his fame was chiefly that of a polemical contender for Christianity. Certainly that was the thrust of Time's cover story on Lewis, which emphasized his then-forthcoming book arguing for the validity of belief in miracles. He was also a highly accomplished scholar, perhaps already (in his mid-40s) the most proficient among Oxford's English faculty. He had written fiction, too, but of a highly intellectual character. The bachelor with no children of his own, and with relatively few friends whose children he knew, did not seem a likely author of a children's book.

In the year before his death, Lewis told a correspondent, "My knowledge of children's literature is really very limited. … My own range is about exhausted by MacDonald, Tolkien, E. Nesbit, and Kenneth Grahame." He hadn't even read The Wind in the Willows or Nesbit's stories until he was in his 20s. Yet he never outgrew his love of the children's stories he did know. Once he discovered The Wind in the Willows, it was forever precious to him. (He told a friend that he always read Grahame's masterpiece when he was in bed with the flu.)

Moreover, Lewis served almost as a midwife to many children's stories of his friends. In 1932, Tolkien took the chance of reading aloud to Lewis a story he had written. Lewis badgered Tolkien into seeking to have it published, which eventually he did in 1938: The story was called The Hobbit. So those who knew Lewis best weren't surprised when he produced drafts of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or when he published it in 1950. Perhaps they would have been surprised had they known that the story, and the six Narnia books that followed it, would bring him greater fame and influence than all his other books combined, making his name known around the world. The Chronicles of Narnia have been translated into more than 30 languages and, worldwide, have sold more than 85 million copies.

Though Lewis was a man who valued friendship above almost all else, such fame made him deeply uncomfortable. He had been a solitary child and always loved being alone. "I am a product," he wrote, "of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books."

In the books that peopled his solitude, Lewis discovered a range of interests ("nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics") that, nurtured and matured, nearly all found their way into his career as a writer. The books by Lewis that Macmillan published in 1943 and 1944 alone (some had been written several years earlier) included two science fiction novels, a theological treatise about suffering, a satire in the form of letters from a devil, and two brief works in explanation and defense of the Christian faith. Looking at such variety, we can understand why Owen Barfield once wrote an essay about his famous friend called "The Five C. S. Lewises."

Yet the chief point of Barfield's essay is that what's remarkable about Lewis is not the diversity of his writing, but the unity: the sense that something ties them all together. What is this unity? Barfield's attempt to explain it is intriguing:

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December 2005, Vol. 49, No. 12