but also widely celebrated. Both Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction continue to make the “100 top book lists” of best-selling and most influential books of the twentieth century.
• A 2019 survey from the United Kingdom (UK) rated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the number one ranked “favorite book” of UK readers.12
• In the fall of 2018 the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) used a national (U.S.) survey to identify the 100 best novels ever written. During an eight-week period, PBS then asked people to nominate their most favorite book. The Chronicles of Narnia series was voted number nine on the list of 100.13
• According to a panel organized by the editor of the National Review, Lewis’s Abolition of Man was ranked seventh; in a “top book” list prepared by Intercollegiate Studies, it was ranked second.14
• A survey of the most read Christian writers suggests that Lewis continues to appeal to a wide variety of readers from various denominational perspectives.15 Among mainline Protestants, Lewis’s books were ranked sixth in popularity.16 According to the same poll, they were ranked eighth by conservative clergy and eleventh among Catholic priests.17
• The widely-read Christian magazine, Christianity Today, ranked Mere Christianity as the best book about Christianity of the twentieth century.18
Mere Christianity has influenced many notable people, including Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, and Francis Collins, an award-winning scientist known for his leadership in the Human Genome Project and Director of the National Institutes of Health.19 Both have credited Lewis with their conversion to Christianity.20 The late Charles Colson, former counsel to President Nixon, who served seven months in prison for obstruction of justice associated with the Watergate scandal and later established a nationally-recognized prison ministry, credits Lewis with changing his life: “I opened Mere Christianity and found myself … face-to-face with an intellect so disciplined, so lucid, so relentlessly logical that I was glad I never had to face him in a court of law.”21 In describing Lewis’s style Colson wrote, “Lewis’ words seemed to pound straight at me.”22 He later added that Lewis’s words, “ripped through the protective armor in which I had unknowingly encased myself for forty-one years.”23 The number of people who have become Christians or had their Christian faith strengthened due to Lewis’s writings is surely in the millions.24
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Lewis is internationally popular. His books have been translated into 47 languages.25 Visitors from around the world visit his home, The Kilns, located about three miles from the center of Oxford. Lewis-themed stained-glass windows can be found not only in his home church in Headington Quarry, near Oxford, but also in St. Luke’s Episcopal church in Monrovia, California, and St. David’s Church, in Denton, Texas.
Not everyone, however, is enamored with treating Lewis as “St. Jack.”26 (Lewis preferred to be called Jack). Lewis biographer A. N. Wilson finds the stained-glass window treatment unnecessarily over the top. Wilson’s biography delves into Lewis’s psychological motivations and peccadillos—something Lewis would have disdained and several Lewis scholars have refuted.27 Lewis undoubtedly would not have approved of the numerous other biographies that have sought to provide “back stage” perceptions of him. Subscribing to “new criticism,” the theory that dominated mid-twentieth-century literary criticism, Lewis thought considering the personality and backstory of an author to be unnecessary and unhelpful when seeking to interpret what the author wrote.28 Lewis’s sentiment: Just study the work, not the personal indulgences of the author.
Why does Lewis remain a best-selling author with a long list of popular titles? Books with Christian themes do not typically make The New York Times bestseller list. What did Lewis do that made his message so accessible? Some writers point to his liberal use of literary tropes such as metaphor and analogy. Others attribute his popularity to his clarity of expression.29 Lewis scholar Terry Lindvall suggest that one of the reasons Lewis remains popular is because of his keen sense of humor.30 Lewis loved to laugh and those who knew him attest to his jovial sense of fun and good humor that sparkles through his writing. Lewis’s popularity is most likely the result of multiple principles and practices, among which is his ability to communicate—to forge a relationship between author and reader. The chapters ahead provide a detailed, panoramic look at his ability to communicate.
Lewis did not have to wait until he died to be famous. Britons readily recognized his voice in the 1940s because of his successful broadcast talks.31 His series of 15-minute BBC radio broadcasts began on August 6, 1941, at 7:45 P.M., and continued at regular intervals for more than two years to a war-weary Britain. His first talk had an audience of 560,000 people; his second talk, a week later, had more than 1.7 million listeners—triple his first night’s broadcast.32 Although his biggest audience on a radio call-in program called Brains Trust had an audience of more than 5 million listeners, they did not hear Lewis at his best. It was one of his performances during which he gave long-winded, tedious answers, not always on point; he was not well received by many in this particular listening audience.33 ←5 | 6→But despite an occasional misstep, he consistently connected to his readers and listeners.
Lewis thought that after his death his popularity would decline and his book sales would decline as well, eventually dwindling to zero. Walter Hooper, Lewis’s secretary during the last summer of Lewis’s life, recalls a specific conversation with Lewis in which he expressed certainty his book sales would taper off after his death. Lewis was concerned about income for his brother, Warren (called “Warnie”), and worried that Warnie would have no substantial income beyond his small pension.34 But Lewis need not have worried. His book sales have continued to flourish, in part because Hooper agreed to edit an existing manuscript, resulting in a “new” book, if the publisher would also re-publish two out-of-print books.35 Because of this shrewd deal, all of Lewis’s books continue to be in print. C. S. Lewis remains famous—more so in the U.S. than where he lived and taught in England, in part because his Christian message resonates with Americans more than it does in a less demonstrably Christian England.36
