Narnia Fans » Alan Jacobs

Wheaton College Professor Alan Jacobs, a Birmingham native, received the John Pollock Award for Christian Biography from Samford University during a chapel service Tuesday at the Beeson Divinity School.

Jacobs was honored for his 2005 book “The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis.”

A journey into the imaginative life of C. S. Lewis exploring the themes and life events that allowed an Oxford don, a scholar of medieval literature who loved to debate philosophy at his local pub, to write one of the most enduring classics of children’s literature.

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C. S. Lewis biographer Dr. Alan Jacobs will receive the 2006 John Pollock Award for Christian Biography on Tuesday Oct. 10 at Samford University. The award, presented by Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School, recognizes Jacob’s book, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, as the most distinguished Christian biography book in the past year.

The public is invited to the award ceremony, which will take place during the university’s chapel service at 11:00 am. Jacabs will also present a talk on Lewis during his award ceremony.

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C.S. Lewis Biographer Alan Jacobs To Receive Beeson Divinity Honor
C.S. Lewis biographer Dr. Alan Jacobs will receive the 2006 John Pollock Award for Christian Biography Tuesday ( Oct. 10 ) at Samford University.

The award, presented annually by Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School, recognizes Jacobs’ book, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, as the most distinguished Christian biography of the past year.

Jacobs will receive the Pollock Award during Beeson divinity school’s regular chapel service at 11 a.m. in Andrew Gerow Hodges Chapel. He will present a talk on scholar/Christian writer Lewis, who is best known for his children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia. The public is invited.

Jacobs, professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois, is also the author of Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling, A Theology of Reading: the Hermeneutics of Love, A Visit to Vanity Fair and Other Moral Essays, Bad to the Bone: A Cultural History of Original Sin, and the forthcoming Life Genres: Persons in Narrative Theology.

An Alabama native who grew up in Birmingham, Jacobs is a 1980 graduate of the University of Alabama. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

The Pollock Award is named for the British author of more than 30 books on religion, the majority of them biographies of Christian leaders. Beeson Divinity School established the award in 2001.

Author Alan Jacobs will discuss “The Narnian: C. S. Lewis and the Culture Wars” at Cambridge Forum Wednesday, Jan. 18, at 7:30 p.m. at 3 Church St. in Harvard Square.

Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century and arguably the most influential Christian writer of his day. Holiday box office receipts for the major motion picture based on his beloved children’s series, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” indicate that his work continues to speak to audiences today. But if you’ve kept up with the movie reviews, you know that Lewis and his kingdom of the imagination have been caught up in our contemporary culture wars. How did this happen? And how would Lewis react to the controversy his work and thinking are generating in America today? Jacobs explores these questions in his new biography, “The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis,” as he illuminates the way Lewis’ experiences were transformed by imagination into writings that continue to touch and challenge us.

Jacobs is a professor of literature at Wheaton College and author of several collections of essays, including “Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truth Telling.” He is a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard and other publications.

Cambridge Forums are free and open to the public. Open discussion follows speaker presentation. Events are taped and edited for public radio broadcast throughout the nation. Edited CDs are available by calling 617-495-2727. Select forums can be viewed in their entirety on demand by visiting www.cambridgeforum.org and clicking on the WGBH Forum Network.

The fantasy world created by C.S. Lewis that has thrilled generations is brought to life again in a filmed version of ‘Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe‘

While exploring their new home in the English countryside, the four Pevensie children find a room that is essentially empty, aside from a wardrobe.

The youngest child, Lucy, stays behind after the others have left to inspect the wooden wardrobe – one that ultimately will transport her and her siblings to a new world of wonder and adventure.

Through the wardrobe lies the land of Narnia, a beautiful place destined to stay in endless winter by the evil White Witch, who turns her dissenters into stone.

While in Narnia, the children meet a mystical faun, befriend a family of beavers, join forces with a great and benevolent lion, defeat the wolf who served as the chief of the secret police, destroy the evil witch, and are crowned kings and queens, saving Narnia from its darkness.

Written in 1950, C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” is the first story written in the “Chronicles of Narnia” series – seven books that have sold more than 100 million copies.

The much-anticipated Walt Disney/Walden Media film “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” opens in theaters Friday.

“There’s something memorable about these books,” said Alan Jacobs, author of “The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis” and a professor of English at west suburban Wheaton College, which houses a collection of Lewis papers and memorabilia.

“It’s just a wonderful idea of going into another world through a musty old wardrobe in an empty room in an old house. It resonates with people’s imaginations.”

That sense of imagination is what keeps the story fresh even though it was written to have taken place during World War II. The children have been taken to the English countryside to avoid bombings on London.

“It’s timeless,” said Paul Martin, author of the Web site NarniaFans.com.

“One reason that I think the book has remained such a powerful story is that it taps into our childlike minds that can imagine whole other worlds and takes children on an adventure that is very empowering to children,” Martin said. “It shows children that they can do more than they think if the put their hearts into it.”

When C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien first met on May 11, 1926 at Oxford University, where Tolkien was a professor of English language and Lewis a professor of English literature, they initially didn’t hit it off. Tolkien didn’t think English literature held much academic validity. Lewis’ Protestant upbringing had taught him never to trust a “Papist”; Tolkien was Catholic.

But both men shared a passion for Nordic legends, and when Tolkien founded a club at Oxford to discuss the Norse language, Lewis readily joined up.

Before long, their conversations turned from Nordic legends to Christianity, says Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis.

“Lewis began his academic career as a philosopher and as an atheist. He was quite proud of his abilities to demolish the claims of any theism,” says Jacobs, a professor of English and director of the Faith and Learning Program at Wheaton College. “Lewis never thought you could argue anyone into conversion. It’s a changing of both the heart and the will, not a changing of the mind.”

In the end, Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity.

“Tolkien talked to him about stories that Lewis loved and got him to think about what it was about those stories that moved him,” Jacobs says. “Many of these stories were reinterpretations of the one great story: the life, crucifixion and rebirth of Jesus Christ.”

In addition to sharing his faith, Tolkien also shared his work. Lewis is believed to be one of the first people Tolkien allowed to read The Hobbit.

“Tolkien didn’t think that anybody else in the world would care about the story he wrote,” Jacobs says, but Lewis was enthusiastic, badgering Tolkien to publish the manuscript until he finally relented. The book was published in 1938.

But Tolkien didn’t return the admiration in the case of Lewis’ Narnia tales.

“He thought they were too cute, for one thing,” Jacobs says. “He also thought it was wrong of Lewis to bring in so many different mythologies, from fauns to Father Christmas. There didn’t seem to be any consistency.”

[Read the rest at the Chicago Sun-Times]

In his erudite new biography of Clive Staples Lewis, Alan Jacobs estimates that from 1949 to 1955, Lewis wrote 600,000 words of prose (not counting work on his book on 16th-century literature).

In anticipation of the new movie “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Harper Collins is releasing all of them, and then some. One hundred and seventy books on, by, or about the famous author and defender of Christianity are being pumped into 60 countries in time for the Dec. 9 premiere.

It’s a stack tall enough to give even the most voracious bookworm vertigo. The result, though, is that readers can satisfy their taste for almost any aspect of Lewis’s life, letters, or arcana (the “Narnia Cookbook,” anyone?). Among the cascade of books are three new biographies of Lewis that share a Christian perspective, but are very different in their approach.

[More at The Victoria Advocate]

In October 1945, C.S. Lewis wrote a slightly grumpy reply to someone asking him to do a book on Christianity, in plain language, specifically for workers. Since giving a series of wartime BBC lectures on the faith’s basics, Lewis had become a kind of Christian Answer Man, and frankly, he had other ambitions and projects. “I am nearly 47,” he complained. “Where are my successors?”

“It’s interesting,” says Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian (HarperSanFrancisco), a new Lewis biography, “that 60 years later, nobody has really turned up.” Lewis, whose day job was Oxford medievalist, did eventually get around to other work, including seven children’s books about a place called Narnia. Ninety-five million Narnia books have been sold since then, and as Disney begins test screenings for its December release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on the series’ first volume, the septet is back near the top of the children’s best-seller lists.

Yet Lewis’ popularity extends beyond the Borders children’s section. This year HarperSanFrancisco, which publishes some of the best known of his dozens of adult titles, including Mere Christianity (a collection of those radio talks) and The Screwtape Letters (a set of funny-creepy faux missives from a senior devil to his nephew), sold 843,000 copies, twice as many as in 2001. Multiple books about Lewis debut annually; this year’s crop features Jacobs’ biography and Jack’s Life (Broadman & Holman) by Lewis’ stepson Douglas Gresham. In 1947, a TIME cover story hailed Lewis as “one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.” Now, 58 years later (and 42 after his death, in 1963), he could arguably be called the hottest theologian of 2005.

[Read more at Time.com]

In his erudite new biography of Clive Staples Lewis, Alan Jacobs estimates that from 1949 to 1955, Lewis wrote 600,000 words of prose (not counting work on his book on 16th-century literature).

In anticipation of the new movie “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Harper Collins is releasing all of them, and then some. One hundred and seventy books on, by, or about the famous author and defender of Christianity are being pumped into 60 countries in time for the Dec. 9 premiere.

It’s a stack tall enough to give even the most voracious bookworm vertigo. The result, though, is that readers can satisfy their taste for almost any aspect of Lewis’s life, letters, or arcana (the “Narnia Cookbook,” anyone?). Among the cascade of books are three new biographies of Lewis that share a Christian perspective, but are very different in their approach.

The Narnian, by Professor Jacobs of Illinois’s Wheaton College, which houses Lewis’s papers, is the most impressive, and is designed for readers who want to get to know Lewis the scholar and theologian.

Jacobs says he’s less interested in what Lewis (who was known to all as “Jack”) did on any given day, than in “the life of the mind, the story of an imagination.” While he follows a chronological format through Lewis’s childhood, the early death of his mother, schooling, and service in World War I, once Lewis is ensconced as a don at Oxford, Jacobs jumps around to themes that most interest him.

[Read the rest at CS Monitor]
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The upcoming movie adaptation of CS Lewis’s book, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is expected to set a new precedent. Far from sitting back and watching, publisher HarperCollins is working closely with filmmaker Walden Media, unleashing a massive, worldwide marketing drive for the books, timed to coincide with the film – and not only for The Chronicles of Narnia, but most of Lewis’s other books as well.

“This is a giant blockbuster for us,” said Susan Katz, president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books. “The Chronicles of Narnia was already important and big for us, but now with the movie it’s taking on a new life of its own. We have 25 movie tie-in editions – it’s a huge event.”

Sales of The Chronicles of Narnia have been rising since last spring, when the movie trailer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was released.

“We’ve been happily surprised by how strong sales of the Narnia books have been,” said Joe Monti, children’s buyer for Barnes & Noble. But it’s not only Lewis’s children’s books that are selling well. “It’s also his non-fiction,” said Monti. “It’s surpassed our expectations at every stage.”

HarperCollins is pumping out 170 CS Lewis-related book titles in more than 60 countries – including 140 related to The Chronicles of Narnia. The number represents a vast variety of editions and companion volumes. Lewis’s own books are only the beginning. Besides various editions of The Chronicles of Narnia, there’s a six-volume box set of Lewis’s mostly Christian books for adults, including Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, Miracles and The Problem of Pain. There’s also a new adult biography titled The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of CS Lewis by Lewis scholar Alan Jacobs.

Then there are the extras, which include A Year With CS Lewis: Daily Readings from his Classic Works; the Mere Christianity Journal, a faux-leather-bound study guide with excerpts and blank pages for reader reflections; Beyond the Wardrobe: The Official Guide to Narnia; and Companion to Narnia, an alphabetised reference book to the world of the Narnia books. And there are not one but two glossy photo books about the making of the movie.

HarperCollins and Walden Media have been working closely together on the marketing surrounding the new film, sharing artwork and promotional plans and co-ordinating timing. Cary Granat, chief executive officer of Walden Media, says: “The more they are able to get people to read the books, the bigger the base to grow the film. As more people want to see the film and read the books, it will extend the franchise. It’s a cultural phenomenon that needs to be managed at all levels.”

However well planned, it’s doubtful such a sprawling programme could work with anyone but Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), who published more than 100 books. An Oxford don and medievalist, his uniquely diverse output makes him – if such a thing is possible – a potentially bigger literary phenomenon than his Oxford friend and colleague JRR Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Unlike Tolkien, Lewis wrote for a wider range of readers, both children and adults, including a science fiction trilogy and an agonised memoir of the death of his wife, A Grief Observed (that love story has already been made into a movie, 1993’s Shadowlands, with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger).

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not the first co-ordinated effort between a publisher and a filmmaker. Boston-based Houghton Mifflin – US publisher of JRR Tolkien – worked closely with New Line Cinema on the three blockbuster movies based on The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Houghton began to see a huge bump in sales as soon as the first movie trailer was released in 2001. Tolkien’s books have sold about 80 million copies, going back to The Hobbit in 1937. About 25 million of those were sold between 2001 and 2003, when the three movies were released.

No one knows how big sales of CS Lewis books will be as a result of the film, but if the Tolkien explosion is any indication, it may prove hard to overestimate.