“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes,’’ wrote Lewis in 1944.

The Legacy of C. S. Lewis

by James E. Person, Jr.

On Friday, November 22, 1963, at about the same time as President John F. Kennedy prepared to enter the black limousine that would take him through downtown Dallas to his violent death, another life was coming to a far less dramatic close across the Atlantic in England. It was late afternoon in the village of Headington Quarry, a few miles outside Oxford, as a retired and infirm university professor, having just taken his afternoon tea, collapsed on the floor of his bedroom with a crash.

“C. S. Lewis is dead,” announced F. R. Leavis to his English literature students at Cambridge University a few days later, while the world mourned for Kennedy. American novelist and essayist D. Keith Mano, then studying at Cambridge, remembers Leavis continuing his brief commentary on Lewis’ passing as follows: “They said in the Times that we will miss him. We will not. We will not.”
It is perhaps uncharitable to repeat this brief anecdote, revealing as it does the words of an honorable man-and Lewis’ longtime foe in theories of literary criticism-in what surely was not his finest hour. Yet it bears repeating if only because it illustrates something of the strong reaction, favorable or unfavorable, C. S. Lewis could evoke-and continues to evoke-from his readers.

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