C. S. Lewis's Real Name: Clive Staples Lewis

Quick answer: C. S. Lewis's documented full name is Clive Staples Lewis. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that he was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Ireland (now in Northern Ireland), and that he died on November 22, 1963, in Oxford, England. He was an Irish-born scholar, novelist, and Christian apologist, known especially for The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity (Britannica).

Real name and early life

The Library of Congress heading is "Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963." Britannica lists the full name Clive Staples Lewis and the other names Clive Hamilton and N.W. Clerk. Family and friends knew him as Jack, a usage also recorded in a Library of Congress citation to C.S. Lewis, his letters to children. Britannica says his father, Albert Lewis, was a solicitor and his mother, Florence Hamilton Lewis, had graduated from the Royal University of Ireland (now Queen's University Belfast). He and his older brother, Warren, were avid readers; Lewis was reading by age three and soon writing stories about a fantasy land of "dressed animals." After unhappy stretches at English boarding schools, he was prepared for Oxford by W.T. Kirkpatrick and won a scholarship in classics at University College in 1916. He served in France with the Somerset Light Infantry in World War I, then took a distinguished Oxford record, including a first in English completed in one year.

Career highlights

Lewis became a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925 and remained there until 1954. From 1954 to 1963 he was professor of medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His first publications, the verse collection Spirits in Bondage (1919) and the narrative poem Dymer (1926), appeared under the name Clive Hamilton. He later turned to scholarly writing and prose, including the autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955). Britannica credits him with about 40 books, many of them on Christian apologetics. The Screwtape Letters appeared in 1942, the seven Narnia books between 1950 and 1956, Mere Christianity in 1952, and A Grief Observed in 1961. The Library of Congress heading also records those literary identities, including the pen names Clive Hamilton and N. W. Clerk.

Death

Britannica records that Lewis died on November 22, 1963, in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England.

Name notes for searchers

Clive Staples Lewis is the documented full name; he published as C. S. Lewis and was known as Jack. Searchers looking for the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Mere Christianity are usually aiming at the same person. Clive Hamilton and N. W. Clerk were pen names.