A second argument to support his legacy as a communicator is that, in addition to continued popular success, Lewis has garnered considerable professional accolades. He earned his living teaching, writing, and speaking. His scholarly books remain required reading in many English department graduate programs ←2 | 3→that focus on literary criticism and English literature of the sixteenth century. Besides inclusion on undergraduate and graduate student reading lists, Lewis and his works remain a popular topic for doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and other academic research and scholarly inquiry.
Finally, both Lewis’s continued popularity and professional contributions and influence support the third and most important argument for the “master communication craftsperson” label—Lewis embedded lessons about how to communicate effectively throughout his works. In addition to being an effective communicator, he also wrote about principles and strategies for communicating well. Many authors are popular, and a few also have impressive professional credentials, but only a select handful devote considerable attention to teaching others how to be effective communicators. Lewis was a professor of communication.
This chapter makes the case that C. S. Lewis should be the focus of a book about communication. He was prolific and endures as a multi-million-book popular author. Colleges and universities continue to assign his work; scholars continue to mine it for his insights about literature and language. And he often wrote about how to be an effective communicator. His spoken and written messages not only model communication principles, but also offer numerous prescriptions for communication effectiveness. Let’s explore these three reasons in more detail.
Lewis sells. Millions of copies of his books are in print, with millions of new readers throughout the world discovering his writing each year. Although it is always challenging to identify the precise number of books Lewis has sold (a challenge both because the number keeps growing larger every year and because publishers typically keep that information proprietary), even modest estimates provide evidence of his astounding popularity. One source suggests that the Narnia books have sold more than 100 million copies.7 Michael Maudlin, an editor of HarperCollins’s C. S. Lewis Bible, made this observation in 2011: “I would say in the last 10 years C. S. Lewis has sold more books than any other 10-year span since he started publishing.”8 Maudlin added, “He’s not only not declining, he is in the sweet spot.”9 His book sales have continued to be strong moving into the third decade of the 21st Century. Lewis scholar James Como notes, “Since his death in November 1963, sales of his books have increased six-fold (with several titles selling more than one million copies per year in some twenty languages).”10 Estimates of Lewis’s total book sales range from 150 to 200 million copies.11
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There is substantial evidence that Lewis’s books are not only widely read, but also widely celebrated. Both Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction continue to make the “100 top book lists” of best-selling and most influential books of the twentieth century.
• A 2019 survey from the United Kingdom (UK) rated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the number one ranked “favorite book” of UK readers.12
• In the fall of 2018 the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) used a national (U.S.) survey to identify the 100 best novels ever written. During an eight-week period, PBS then asked people to nominate their most favorite book. The Chronicles of Narnia series was voted number nine on the list of 100.13
• According to a panel organized by the editor of the National Review, Lewis’s Abolition of Man was ranked seventh; in a “top book” list prepared by Intercollegiate Studies, it was ranked second.14
• A survey of the most read Christian writers suggests that Lewis continues to appeal to a wide variety of readers from various denominational perspectives.15 Among mainline Protestants, Lewis’s books were ranked sixth in popularity.16 According to the same poll, they were ranked eighth by conservative clergy and eleventh among Catholic priests.17
• The widely-read Christian magazine, Christianity Today, ranked Mere Christianity as the best book about Christianity of the twentieth century.18
Mere Christianity has influenced many notable people, including Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, and Francis Collins, an award-winning scientist known for his leadership in the Human Genome Project and Director of the National Institutes of Health.19 Both have credited Lewis with their conversion to Christianity.20 The late Charles Colson, former counsel to President Nixon, who served seven months in prison for obstruction of justice associated with the Watergate scandal and later established a nationally-recognized prison ministry, credits Lewis with changing his life: “I opened Mere Christianity and found myself … face-to-face with an intellect so disciplined, so lucid, so relentlessly logical that I was glad I never had to face him in a court of law.”21 In describing Lewis’s style Colson wrote, “Lewis’ words seemed to pound straight at me.”22 He later added that Lewis’s words, “ripped through the protective armor in which I had unknowingly encased myself for forty-one years.”23 The number of people who have become Christians or had their Christian faith strengthened due to Lewis’s writings is surely in the millions.24
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Lewis is internationally popular. His books have been translated into 47 languages.25 Visitors from around the world visit his home, The Kilns, located about three miles from the center of Oxford. Lewis-themed stained-glass windows can be found not only in his home church in Headington Quarry, near Oxford, but also in St. Luke’s Episcopal church in Monrovia, California, and St. David’s Church, in Denton, Texas.
Not everyone, however, is enamored with treating Lewis as “St. Jack.”26 (Lewis preferred to be called Jack). Lewis biographer A. N. Wilson finds the stained-glass window treatment unnecessarily over the top. Wilson’s biography delves into Lewis’s psychological motivations and peccadillos—something Lewis would have disdained and several Lewis scholars have refuted.27 Lewis undoubtedly would not have approved of the numerous other biographies that have sought to provide “back stage” perceptions of him. Subscribing to “new criticism,” the theory that dominated mid-twentieth-century