Clive Staples Lewis (known to his friends as Jack, a name that will be used throughout this article) was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the younger brother of Warren Hamilton Lewis. Their father, Albert Lewis, was a successful lawyer in Belfast. His wife, Flora Hamilton, whom he had married on August 29, 1894, was the daughter of the vicar of St. Mark's Church, Dundela, a church in Belfast, Northern Ireland. While starting from a humble beginning, Lewis became known as

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... a writer, speaker, radio broadcaster, apologist, and educator, and his books have sold more than two hundred and fifty million copies to this day. This article will show how his early life and education prepared him to become one of the most effective writers of the twentieth century. | 8 | of what children's stories should be like and enabled him to mature far more quickly than the typical child. By the age of ten writing had become a habit. Then tragedy struck. When the two brothers were at a rather tender age, their mother, Flora, contracted cancer, went through surgery, and eventually died. She died on August 23, 1908, when Jack was only nine years old and Warren thirteen. That same year Jack was sent to Wynyard School, near London, where his brother Warren had already begun, putting both of them in one of the worst schools in the history of British education. Jack left Wynyard when it closed in July 1910, for lack of pupils, but at Wynyard Jack acquired a love of the science fiction novels of H.G. Wells and other space-travel books. That fall he attended Campbell College in Belfast, in January he started at Cherbourg House in Malvern, and a year later he enrolled at Malvern College. After two years at Cherbourg House, Jack won a scholarship to Malvern College, based on an excellent English essay he had written. During these years at Cherbourg and Malvern College, he developed a love for the music of the German composer Richard Wagner, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, Norse mythology, and the Classics. At Cherbourg House, in 1912 or 1913, however, while just fourteen years of age he came to regard himself as an atheist. Private Tutoring Jack never did enjoy the private school system, and on September 9, 1914, he went to study with W. T. Kirkpatrick at Great Bookham in Surrey. He lived with Kirkpatrick and his wife for 2 ½ years, learning how to think, reading the Classics in the original languages, studying French, Italian, and German, and exploring much of English literature and many other subjects. His tutor William T. Kirkpatrick (1848Kirkpatrick ( -1921) ) was a rationalist, a logician, and an atheist, but young Lewis revered Kirkpatrick as the man who taught him how to think. In 1914, Jack also met Arthur Greeves for the first time, and these two became lifelong friends. Arthur's interest in art provided some balance for Jack, who was adopting a very rationalistic attitude during this time. Jack would write nearly three hundred letters to Arthur over the next half-century, describing what he was reading and writing as well as sharing various kinds of intimate experiences. George MacDonald (1824MacDonald ( -1905) ) was the Scottish writer who most influenced Jack in his journey toward Christianity. In March 1916, Jack read MacDonald's Phantastes and called it "a great literary experience." He wrote that this book baptized his imagination, beginning his journey on the road from atheism to Christianity. During these years, as is true of every period in his life, Jack was also reading much more, from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene to John Milton, from the poets Keats and Shelley to W. B. Yeats, from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.