C.S. Lewis
1898–1963 · Author, scholar of medieval literature
Author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Undergraduate at University College, Fellow at Magdalen for 29 years, lived at The Kilns from 1930.
Clive Staples Lewis came up to University College in 1917, served in the First World War, and returned to Oxford in 1925 as Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College — a post he held for the next twenty-nine years. In 1930 he, his brother Warren and Janie Moore bought The Kilns in Headington Quarry, on the eastern edge of the city; it was Lewis's home for the rest of his life.
Lewis was the central figure of the Inklings, the literary circle whose Tuesday-morning gatherings at the Eagle and Child on St Giles' and Thursday-evening sessions in his Magdalen rooms shaped both his Christian apologetics and the Narnia sequence. He died at the Kilns on 22 November 1963 — overshadowed in the news by the assassination of John F. Kennedy the same day — and was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, with his brother Warren added to the grave in 1973. A memorial in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey was added in 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
Sources: Wikipedia: C. S. Lewis · Wikipedia: The Kilns · Wikipedia: Inklings
Last verified: Sat May 02 2026 01:00:00 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)