C.S. Lewis: Views From Wake Forest

C. S. Lewis: Views From Wake Forest is a collection of sixteen insightful essays that will delight both Inklings scholars and C. S. Lewis readers of all ages and opinions. Walter Hooper, for example, the man most responsible for preserving, publishing, and promoting Lewis' many works after Lewis' death in 1963, shares stories from his work with Lewis, Owen Barfield, Lady Collins, and other friends of Lewis in his essay 'Editing C. S. Lewis, ' an inspiring tale as well as a landmark event in Lewis scholarship. James Como, author of Why I Believe in Narnia and a Keynote Speaker at the international conference from which these essays were collected, reveals the neglected C. S. Lewis, the cultural critic and public philosopher whose insights and thinking give Lewis' more popular novels and apologetic works their weight and value. Fourteen more Lewis scholars explore Lewis' invaluable social criticism, his philosophical and theological insights, his Narnia books and Ransom Trilogy, as well as his medieval imagination and mythological artistry. For the serious student of C. S. Lewis as well as for anyone wanting to understand the Narnian novelist and Christian genius more profoundly, C. S. Lewis: Views From Wake Forest is a book that will open up new dimensions and ways of appreciating his multi-faceted brilliance

Walter Hooper was born in Reidsville, N.C., in 1931 and attended the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1954. He served in the U.S. Army for two years and reentered the university as a graduate student in education in 1957. He received a master's degree in education in 1958, and, for a time, taught school in Chapel Hill and at Christ School, Asheville, N.C. Hooper was an instructor of English at the University of Kentucky in 1963, when he went to England and met C. S. Lewis. They became friends in the summer of 1963. After Lewis died on 22 November 1963, Hooper devoted himself to perpetuating the memory of C. S. Lewis and his work. Hooper, who was ordained into the Anglican priesthood while residing in England, served as chaplain of two Oxford Colleges, Jesus and Wadham, and as an assistant rector of the church of St. Mary Magdalene in Oxford. Hooper became a member of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988, and he is now a Roman Catholic layman.

As a lecturer, writer, teacher, and communication consultant JAMES COMO has counseled and addressed a broad diversity of people within a wide range of settings at home and abroad. He holds the Ph.D. in Language, Literature and Rhetoric from Columbia University and now is Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and Public Communication at York College (CUNY) where, upon joining the faculty in 1968, he founded the Speech discipline and thereafter, with a number of colleagues, the Department of Performing and Fine Arts, which he would chair for fifteen years. A founding member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society (1969), his Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis is a ground-breaking study of Lewis as a rhetorician and his Remembering C. S. Lewis is a benchmark biographical anthology now in its third edition (and fourth decade). These, along with his many articles on Lewis in such journals as The Wilson Quarterly and The New Criterion and on-air commentary for five biographical documentaries have established Dr. Como as one of the most highly-regarded Lewis scholars in the world. His most noteworthy book, from the Oxford University Press, is A Very Short Introduction to C. S. Lewis.