C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, published during the 1950s, are the most widely read Christian fairy tales of the twentieth century.

Children devour them, not realizing, in most cases, that they are reading religious morality tales in the guise of pagan fantasy.

Clives Staples Lewis (called "Jack") was born November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His mother died when he was nine, devastating him and his brother Warren. As a child, Lewis was bookish and precocious, and enjoyed writing of an imaginary world of talking beasts called "Animal-Land." In adolescence, he became an atheist; his education at Oxford and experience in the trenches in World War I did little to change his philosophy.

Between 1925 and 1954, Lewis was Fellow of English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. When he was in his early thirties, as a result of his...