"No one reads C.S. Lewis these days," wrote a reviewer in The New York Times, "...except children and Christians." I was editor of one of the two books under consideration in the Book Review that Sunday - C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, and Other Reminiscences - and I can tell you that the laughter provoked by that remark caromed around Third Avenue for a week. The reason was that Macmillan was selling more than twenty thousand copies a week, more than a million copies a year, of sixteen Lewis titles; among them The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. That did not include what Harcourt Brace Jovanovich was selling of ten Lewis titles, Surprised by Joy and The Four Loves among them, nor what Eerdmans was selling of four titles, God in the Dock and Christian Reflections among them; nor what Seabury and Bantam were selling of A Grief Observed; nor indeed what Collins in London was selling of all of them to the rest of the English-reading world.
--William Griffin
in Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life
Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life, the 1986 biography by William Griffin, is a chronological account of Lewis' affairs, from the mundane to the sublime, including Lewis' own descriptions of the people and events that influenced him. While Griffin doesn't explore the processes of Lewis' thought as deeply as one would wish, he does offer a convincing portrait of a universally loved and respected writer.
Short excerpts from Griffin's book accompany commentaries by Russell Kirk, Peter Kreeft, and Michael Aeschliman on Lewis' life and work
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