News for Nov. 02, 2005

Beyond the Wardrobe

11/02/05, 6:31 pm EST - Xoanon

In October 1945, C.S. Lewis wrote a slightly grumpy reply to someone asking him to do a book on Christianity, in plain language, specifically for workers. Since giving a series of wartime BBC lectures on the faith's basics, Lewis had become a kind of Christian Answer Man, and frankly, he had other ambitions and projects. "I am nearly 47," he complained. "Where are my successors?" "It's interesting," says Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian (HarperSanFrancisco), a new Lewis biography, "that 60 years later, nobody has really turned up." Lewis, whose day job was Oxford medievalist, did eventually get around to other work, including seven children's books about a place called Narnia. Ninety-five million Narnia books have been sold since then, and as Disney begins test screenings for its December release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on the series' first volume, the septet is back near the top of the children's best-seller lists. [More]