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Many experienced Lewis as a teacher, lecturer, and tutor. He was an expert in medieval and Renaissance literature. When teaching, he expected his students to present well-thought-out arguments and points as they interacted with literary texts. He had a high demand for his students. He helped students learn in their own voice by guiding them to conclusions.
The Inklings
This group of thinkers began with simple conversations between Lewis and Tolkien. It eventually grew to include nineteen individuals who wanted to participate in these conversations.
Their first meetings often took place at Lewis’s rooms at Oxford. As they drank tea and smoked pipes, Lewis would simply ask, “What is anyone working on?” A member of the group would offer to read and they would discuss and flesh out ideas. This eventually migrated to the Rabbit Room on Tuesdays during lunch.
Lewis and Fiction
Lewis was sprung into the world of apologetics that led him to write fiction. Whereas Tolkien’s fictional worlds did not overlap with ours, Lewis’s fictional worlds very much overlapped with what we could call “The real world.”
In all of his works (including fiction), Lewis attempts to explain how human beings interact with God's attributes when they are expressed on a smaller scale—wrath, love, justice, etc. This was Lewis’s attempt to explore reality through allegory.
Career and Family
Lewis eventually ended up at Cambridge with the help and influence of Tolkien.
Surprisingly, he kept his marriage largely private to public knowledge. He entered his marriage through a partnership, which later led to him falling deeply in love with his wife, Joy. Several months after their wedding, Joy was diagnosed with breast cancer. She lived two more years and died in July of 1960.
Lewis died in June 1963 at age 65. An American, Walter Hooper, who had been corresponding with Lewis for several years, got to meet Lewis just six months before his passing. Lewis made Hooper his literary executor. And Hooper is the reason we know Lewis as we do today.
Brittany Proffitt lives in Dallas and is a writer and content manager for So We Speak.