Becoming C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis

Who is the primary audience of this new biography? I would say that it would most appeal to scholars. A strong interest in history, literature, philosophy, the first world war would certainly help. A love of Lewis' writing--his literary essays, his philosophy, his nonfiction, his fiction--would be an absolute must. It isn't enough to merely love and adore the Chronicles of Narnia. One must equally love and adore his other books and articles as well. <br /><br />The premise of this one is simple, "During his school days, the boy who would grow to become C. S. Lewis formed his most important tastes in music, art, literature, companionship, religion, sports, and almost every other aspect of life. While his ideas and critical thought about what he liked and disliked would change, his basic preferences came together during this period and formed the foundation out of which his later life grew." And..."The questions of C. S. Lewis that began to form in his mind during childhood and adolescence would compel him toward answers that resulted in his conversion to faith in Jesus Christ many years later."<br /><br />But above all else, this one requires an enormous amount of patience--the patience of a saint, perhaps?! It is tedious, cumbersome work. Unless you are incredibly curious to know about smallest details of his daily life, year after year after year after year...one could probably sum up everything you really needed to know about this time period in his life in about a hundred pages--maybe 112 pages.<br /><br />This one is idea-driven. What ideas did C.S. Lewis hold during his childhood and adolescence? When did those ideas form? Did those ideas change throughout these years? Did these ideas change as he became an adult? Did they ever change? To what extent did he stay the same and to what extent did he change? What books did he read? When did he read them? Did he reread them? Did he talk about them with anyone? Did his opinions on those books, on those authors change over time? Are there any parallels between his own books that he would later write and those that he read? Are there any similar themes? What relationships were significant to him when he was eight? when he was nine? when he was ten? when he was eleven? when he was twelve? when he was thirteen? ETC. <br /><br />So many WORDS. It's not that I didn't care at all. It's that I didn't care all that much. For example, do we really need to know how often a young Jack Lewis thought about sex? which friends he discussed sex with? what his sexual fantasies were? who he fantasized about? how Lewis viewed women at this time in his life? where he got his views of women from? I pick on this one issue--which I consider almost non-relevant to C.S. Lewis the author and theologian revered by Christian masses. Almost. I mean, I suppose it shows his fallenness. But still. And this is just one example. <br /><br />All that being said...I can't deny the book was well-researched. He obviously spent A LOT of time finding out EVERY LITTLE THING he possibly could about C.S. Lewis. And I do believe there are a handful of readers in the world who will care because they share a similar obsession with anything and everything Lewis related. The details go to the extreme. But it's a solid read.

It’s always difficult to picture a strong believer’s pre-conversion, and I found reading what Lewis was like disturbing at times. Certainly, God ordained each day of his life though, and this book shows how he became the man we admire. I liked reading about the types of stories he loved as a kid and how they liken to the stories he later wrote.

As a child I loved the wonderful world of Narnia. Last summer I had the opportunity to visit Oxford, which magnified just how influenced Lewis was by his culture. Poe’s work connects the dots with how Lewis was influenced by his upbringing and how his background found it’s way in his writings, both fictional and non-fictional. I look forward to reading the next volume.

Quite simply an enthralling read. I've read Lewis's autobiography, Surprised By Joy, numerous times (once as recently as last year), and had some worry going into this book that it would cover too much ground with which I was already pretty familiar. That wasn't the case at all, happily, and this first volume (of a planned three), covering Lewis's early experiences and intellectual and emotional development, has helped me understand both Lewis and his works better than I have so far. Can't wait to start Volume 2!

A well-researched deep dive into CS Lewis’s adolescence, from roughly the death of his mother until his return to Oxford following the First World War. <br /><br />Poe makes a compelling case that these years were the most important formative period of Lewis’s life, a period in which he formed his most profound loves (Wagner, Spenser, Malory, Homer, chivalric romance, the sagas) and hatreds; grew first from a naive youth to an insufferably arrogant young prig before finally maturing into the beginnings of his famous friendliness and charity; and, perhaps most importantly, received the intellectual and moral formation that would work against his intemperate and haughty rationality and snobbery to lead him to the clear sightedness and open mindedness that characterized his mature thinking. Poe also does a good job of mining Lewis’s extant letters to his father Albert, his brother Warnie, and his best friend Arthur to chart the development and growth of Lewis’s character across this period. The picture is not always flattering, as Lewis himself would have acknowledged, and that makes his growth—his “journey”—all the more striking. <br /><br />All that said, the book is not well organized in some sections—even within paragraphs—and as some more critical reviewers have noted it is repetitive. A final chapter in which Poe summarizes the myriad ways in which these years set Lewis on a course to both his career and his conversion is good but feels rushed. But I think those are minor faults, especially if you come to this book wanting the things I’ve described above. <br /><br />Recommended to those who was a more detailed, scrutinizing look at Lewis’s early years than one is going to get from some of the standard biographies.

This is a well-researched and intriguing biography of C.S. Lewis, the author and lay theologian, and is the first of a three-volume work. Here, the book covers the first 20 years of Lewis' life, his formative years of his origins in Northern Ireland, his school years in England and his time on the Western Front in the latter part of WWI. It would be an eventful, often troubled boyhood, with harsh "public" (i.e., private upper-class) schools and his eventual tribulations in the war; it was a period that young Lewis would pick up an uneven education, encounter the rigors of puberty and fall out of religious belief.<br /><br />The author, a C.S. Lewis scholar, has had the benefit of newly published memoirs, letters and material, and has also explored archives in Oxford and elsewhere. This book does draw out more detail about Lewis' life, even more than Lewis would describe in his own autobiography <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/121732.Surprised_by_Joy_The_Shape_of_My_Early_Life" title="Surprised by Joy The Shape of My Early Life by C.S. Lewis" rel="noopener">Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life</a>. The author could have kept to this outline but has filled out Lewis' account with much more context and detail.<br /><br />In a way, this book could be titled "The Education of C.S. Lewis" because it traces young Lewis' literary tastes, philosophy studies, intellectual habits and formative interests. We also learn of his socializing, usually negative, in school and his formative time later with a private tutor, W. T. Kirkpatrick, who seems to have been a gifted teacher and a good mentor. We even learn about Lewis' early erotic interests, along with those of his closest boyhood friend, Arthur Greeves, who unlike Lewis seems to have developed same-sex interests as well as shared intellectual interests. Lewis did spend a brief time at Oxford, much of it in officer training, and come to realize that the poshy disdain of the "bloods" -- upper-class boys he had encountered at school -- would not be there when he came back from the war, for many of the "bloods" would not come back from the trenches. All of this, the author tells us, is what would form C.S. Lewis.<br /><br />The author does leap forward in his narrative a bit, foreshadowing Lewis' later Oxford friendship with his literary "Inklings" circle, notably influential friends like J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, and their re-conversion of Lewis back to Christianity. This comes later, for Lewis at 20, in 1918, was yet to find fame and intellectual maturity, and just beginning to settle in at Oxford. Still, we see him on the cusp of a greater life, and the author shows considerable empathy in telling Lewis' story so far. His description of the educational milieu of Britain, its religious and social life, is perceptive and clear, and we learn much of Lewis' times, not just his early life. Highly recommend -- and I look forward to the next volume.<br /><br />Read in advance-reading copy from Amazon Vine. Publication due out Nov. 2019.

I own many books on and by C S Lewis, and I have read many on his life, but this is the first book I have read that traces what he read during the formative period of his life from birth through age twenty, AND it also identifies how that reading shaped his writing and his adulthood. This is a book I need to add to my personal library. The segments on Spenser's Faerie Queene were excellent, and totally worth the cost of the book.<br /><br />In 2014, when I was preparing to spend the summer at Oxford, I worked my way through the first two volumes of Lewis' Letters compiled by Walter Hooper, hoping to gain a greater sense of two things. First, I wanted to know which places at Oxford would have historical significance for me during my visit, and second, I wanted to know what books influenced Lewis the most. I knew Spenser's Faerie Queene had had a signficant impact. I knew that he liked Morris. And I knew that George MacDonald's Phantastes had baptized his imagination. What I didn't know was how each of these books (and others) had impacted his writing throughout his life. Now, after reading Dr. Poe's book, I do. I also understand more fully how Lewis' pleasure reading during his formative years were used to draw him to Christ.<br /><br />Some noteworthy excerpts (especially for classical educators):<br /><br />-Lewis considered Homer better than Virgil throughout his life, regarding The Aeneid as simply a derivative or a reproduction of Homer's Iliad. (His thoughts on this can be found in his Preface to Paradise Lost.)<br /><br />-He did not care much for either Demosthenes or Cicero, but he had a slightly higher view of Demosthenes.<br /><br />-Lewis did enjoy Lucretius, Catullus, Tacitus, and Herodotus. (And as I was reading this, I wondered if perhaps the reason he enjoyed these authors was that at least two of them wrote more about war. I am not familiar with the writings of Catullus or Lucretius, so perhaps this thought is way out of line. He had not experienced the horrors of war at the point when he was reading these.)<br /><br />-He loved reading William Morris, especially his The Well at the World's End (which he modeled his own Pilgrims Regress upon).<br /><br />On a related note, I really appreciated the way Dr. Poe did his footnotes. His footnote presentation made it extremely easy to find the sources cited throughout the book.<br /><br />All in all, a great resource for writers and definitely different from any other resource on Lewis's reading.

One of the most groundbreaking Lewis books since Alister McGrath's Biography or Michael Ward's books–but not groundbreaking in the way Ward's or McGrath's were. Poe writes a biography specifically covering a period he believes is neglected by other writers–his childhood (1898-1918). He argues that Lewis spends the majority of "Surprised by Joy" on his school days, but biographers skimp on the same period. Poe is trying to fill that niche and account for the disparity between the autobiography and the biographies. <br /><br />It works really well. given the large volume of letters Lewis wrote, especially to Arthur Greeves, there is a lot of material to glean from that is interesting for the Lewis-fan. For example, one learns about Lewis' opinions about the English, the French, women, the upper class, etc. which is interesting. One also learns about his sexual habits and thoughts, which come across as a little bit sensational, but whatever. The most interesting tidbits involve Poe's tracking of his literary tastes and how his reading habits and education at school and then with Kirkpatrick shaped his future writing and scholarship. It is particularly exciting for me, as I'm taking a class in Renaissance literature right now. As I read Spenser and Milton, I get to read about young Jack Lewis reading the same authors. <br /><br />In the end, the theme of this book, that Poe probably repeats too many times, is that the interests and aversions cultivated by young Jack during his formative years would set the stage for his later life, and this is why a deeper study of that period is needed. <br /><br />I doubt that the other two volumes (one of which I have, the other will be released in October, your move Crossway I'll you my address!) will be as unique as this one. After all, Poe admits that the bulk of the biographical scholarship is on the periods he will cover in those last two volumes (1919–1963). <br /><br />This is not really a book for the casual Lewis fan–read Sayer or McGrath for that. But, if you have already read those, and want to go deeper, read this volume, because it doesn't tread over the same ground–it really introduces you to the huge volume of letters that you'll never read anyway!

Becoming C. S. Lewis follows the life of Jack Lewis from birth to his transition to adulthood at age 20 following World War I. The book focuses quite a bit on his school years and the literally influences and atheist world view he developed during that time. Harry Lee Poe, a Christian scholar, sets this as part 1 of a trilogy he is writing about Lewis life and conversion to Christianity. He shows how the groundwork for his faith is being set up during his formative years and after world war I he has shifted from materialism towards an agnostic view after being in the trenches. In addition to the complicated life with his family the book also explores his outlook on being Irish in an English society and his views on Home Rule shaping throughout the book. From his intellectual development to his love of literature this is probably the most in depth study written to date on C. S. Lewis formative years. If you are interested in biographies of authors, then this is a must read but if you are looking for a more casual biography of Lewis than this will likely be overkill.

Becoming C. S. Lewis (1898–1918): A Biography of Young Jack Lewis by [Poe, Harry Lee]I found this book, Becoming C.S. Lewis, to be a well-researched volume. This is to be the first of three-volumes on the gentleman. It talks about the first 20 years of Lewis' life. His time in Northern Ireland, England and in WWI. He had his troubles during this time - his education was hit and miss, and difficulties with religion.<br /><br />The author, Harry Lee Poe was able to use his research, including recent published letters, memoirs and more to show the details of Lewis' life,<br /><br />I found this book to be very thorough and knowledgeable. I highly recommend it.<br /><br />I was given this book by NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. <br /><br /><br /><br />