Joel Heck's Lewis Site

In one sense, this chronology will never be finished. New information will pop up and beg to be included, while new ways of organizing and presenting what’s here will also develop. But this major update formally concludes this project, begun during the Fall of 2004, nearly thirteen years ago. I have now just finished a read-through of all of The Lewis Papers and have recorded everything I could learn from those papers for the lives of C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren. That means that everything of the Lewis brothers, whether published or unpublished, has been read and incorporated. This last update mostly provides more information from the diary of Warren Lewis about the last six months of 1930, particularly August 4 through December 6.

The project began shortly after I spoke to Peter Schakel at the Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois, in the summer of 2004, asking him if anyone had ever brought all of the historical information about C. S. Lewis into one place. He didn’t think so; he was right. I met him that summer, just days after I had begun reading his book, Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis (the hardcover edition which came out in 2002). And, of course, I asked him to autograph my copy. We haven’t crossed paths since, so that meeting seems to have been a divine encounter. More than two-thirds of a million words, 1,180 pages, and 3,553 footnotes later, here is Chronologically Lewis, finally finished. My best estimate on the amount of time that I have put into this project is about one hour per day for thirteen years. That works out to 4,745 hours. We will soon be able to round it off to an even five thousand hours. I want to thank the many people who have written me over the years, telling me how much they have appreciated this resource, and others who have made suggestions and offered helpful content and corrections. Many have written, or spoken to me personally, but I want to share excerpts from one of the most comments that I have received, this one from the United Kingdom in July of this year.

“I was absolutely delighted to stumble across your Chronologically Lewis resource! This strikes me as the most important and exciting thing to happen in Lewis studies since the Collected Letters – and has the added advantage of being free of charge.… I also have a particular interest in Warnie Lewis, and have read everything I can find on him short of visiting the Marion Wade collection – so your Chronology should provide a feast of new material for me over the weeks ahead.” (from Prof Bruce G Charlton MD [Newcastle] MA [Durham], Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine, University of Buckingham, Newcastle University UK)