Passionate about his dislikes and loves, Lewis never left a neutral acquaintance, listener, or reader.
Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in Dundela Villas, Belfast, the second child of Albert Lewis, a prosecuting attorney, and Florence Augusta Hamilton Lewis, known as Flora; his brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis, had been born on 16 June 1895. According to Wilson, Albert Lewis was a "soulful poet" and a skilled and funny raconteur. In Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955) Lewis describes his father's side of the family as "true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness." His paternal grandfather, Richard Lewis, came from a line of Welsh farmers but was born in Ireland; he was a master boilermaker for the Cork Steamship Company. He was also--though Lewis does not mention the fact in Surprised by Joy--a writer who made up science-fiction stories to amuse his children and who read essays to fellow members of the Workman's Reading Room at the steamship company.
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