The Essential C. S. Lewis » (Reprint)

C. S. Lewis was famous both as a fiction writer and as a Christian thinker, and scholars sometimes divide his personality in two. Yet a large part of Lewis's appeal, for both his audiences, lay in his ability to fuse imagination with instruction. "Let the pictures tell you their own moral," he once advised writers of children's stories. "But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in."

In this wide-ranging and authoritative collection of C.S. Lewis's writings, Lyle W. Dorsett brings together the many and varied facets of the beloved author's corpus. Selecting works of fiction, science fiction, autobiography, theology, poetry, and literary criticism, as well as Lewis's letters to adults and children, Dorsett shows the erudite author at his most innovative, challeneging, witty, and sympathetic.

Among the pieces included are Lewis's famous sermons, selections from The Screwtape Letters and Letters to Children, and the complete texts of three of Lewis's books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the first of The Chronicles of Narnia; Perelandra, the critically acclaimed second installment of Lewis's Space Trilogy; and The Abolition of Man, Lewis's brief treatise on philosophy and education.