CS Lewis is perhaps the best-known Christian writer of the 20th century. His novels for children and adults and his writings as an apologist for Christianity are still widely read, appreciated and discussed. Scholarly of English literature, particularly medieval and Renaissance, he was a professor at Oxford and Cambridge and also a writer of poetry. Lewis said of why he wrote: "I wrote the books that I would have liked to read, if only I could have gotten them" (Faces, vii). The editors of Time, in their preface to Till We Have Faces, wrote: “Fortunately for Western literature, CS Lewis was superbly endowed with the qualities that make a writer great: wit, wisdom, and warmth; a formidable erudition, which he never used for scholarship; a deep, sometimes uncomfortably deep, understanding of human nature; and above all, a robust and luminous imagination, the creative grace that we call “the sensitive intellect”” (Faces, vii). Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1898. He had an older brother, Warren, nicknamed Warnie. . When Clive Lewis was around four years old, he announced to his family that his name was "Jacksie". His refusal to answer to any other name meant that he was known as Jack to his family and friends for the rest of his life. His parents were of very different temperaments which he describes in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early. Life: The two families I came from were as different in temperament as in their origins. My father's people were true Welsh, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily given to both anger and tenderness; men who laughed and cried a lot and who didn't have much talent for happiness. [My mother'...... middle of paper...... Yours, CS Lewis (Letters, 44,45) CS Lewis died quietly at his home on November 22, 1963, the same day as John F.Kennedy. He will live by his works for many generations to come.Workd Citedhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/people/cslewis_1.shtml#h17Lewis, CS A Grief Observed. Bantam Books: New York, 1976. Ibid. Letters to children. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1995. Ibid. Screw letters. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1996. Ibid. Surprised by Joy. Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.: New York, 1955. Ibid. Until we have faces. Time Life Books: New York, 1966. Lurie, Alison. “The passion of CS Lewis.” The New York Review of Books (NYRB): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/feb/09/the-passion-of-cs-lewis.