Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931 - Tapa dura

This collection brings together the best of C.S. Lewis’s letters – some published for the first time. Arranged in chronological order, this is the first volume covering Family Letters: 1905-1931.

C.S. Lewis was a most prolific letter writer and his personal correspondence reveals much of his private life, reflections, friendships and feelings. This collection, carefully chosen and arranged by Walter Hooper, is the most extensive ever published.

In this great and important collection are the letters Lewis wrote to J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, Owen Barfield, Arthur C. Clarke, Sheldon Vanauken and Dom Bede Griffiths. To some particular friends, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Lewis wrote over fifty letters alone. The letters deal with all of Lewis’s interests: theology, literary criticism, poetry, fantasy, children’s stories as well as revealing his relationships with family members and friends.

This first volume of Family Letters: 1905-1931 covers Lewis’s boyhood and early manhood, his army years, undergraduate life at Oxford and his election to a fellowship at Magdalen College. Lewis became an atheist when he was 13 years old and his dislike of Christianity is evident in many of his letters. The volume concludes with a letter describing an evening spent with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson when he came to see that he was wrong to think of Christianity as one of ‘many myths.’ ‘What Dyson and Tolkien showed me was that... the story of Christ is simply a true myth... but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.’

The first volume of 'Collected Letters' begins with C.S. Lewis's earliest letter. The date is 1905 and the seven-year old 'Jack', as he is known, writes of the delights of home to his brother away at boarding school. Three years later the two brothers are both miserable at the school he refers to as a 'concentration camp'. He writes to his father, 'Please may we not leave? We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term.' His childhood letters reveal the world of his vivid imagination and his developing opinion on various subjects.

At 16 Jack is writing to a boy his own age in Belfast, Arthur Greeves. Their correspondence was to continue over the next fifty years. In 1916 he writes, 'Cheer up, whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.' He also tells Arthur that he has abandoned the Christian faith. 'I believe in no religion,' he says. 'There is absolutely no proof for any of them.'

Lewis goes up to Oxford in 1917 as a determined atheist. Before he can settle down he is called up to fight in the Battle of the Somme and is wounded. He returns to Oxford and brilliantly achieves three First Class degrees. His letters home describes his thoughts and feelings through the horrors of war and sweetness of academic success.

In 1929 Lewis writes to Arthur of a friendship which was to have an enormous influence on him and his writings. 'I was up till 2.30 on Monday talking to the Anglo-Saxon professor Tolkien who came back with me to College ... and sat discoursing of the gods and giants and Asgard for three hours.' Gradually, as Lewis spends time with Tolkien and other friends, he admits in his letters o a change of view on religion. In 1930 he writes, 'Whereas once I would have said, "Shall I adopt Christianity?" I now wait to see whether it will adopt me.'

C.S. Lewis was the most prolific letter writer. Throughout his life he maintained correspondence with family member and friends. 'Collected Letters' brings together many of Lewis's best letters, some published here for the first time.

· 'Volume I Family Letters 1905-1931'
· 'Volume II The Christian Scholar
1931-1951'
· 'Volume III Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1952-1963'