As a child in Belfast, Ireland, C.S. Lewis and his cousins would crawl inside an ornate antique wardrobe built by Lewis' grandfather and tell stories. Years later, that wardrobe became the door to Narnia, the fantasy landscape inhabited by witches, dwarfs, talking lions and half-human fawns, that has entertained young readers for more than half a century.

At first, Narnia was simply a playground for characters that kept popping up in Lewis' vivid imagination, like the umbrella-toting fawn that he had first imagined at age 16. Later it evolved into a morality epic that would nurture in children the Christian ideals of dutifulness, justice, prudence, self-control, love, and fidelity that Lewis believed so important for the survival of human society.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the first of the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia series, was published in 1950. It has never been out of print, and the long-awaited movie version has been filling theaters. Although the Narnia books were meant for a young audience, Lewis was certain adults might benefit from reading them aloud to children.

In addition to his renown as a Christian author, C.S. Lewis was a foremost scholar and a noted professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford University. He was once described as the best-read man of his generation. Kenneth Tynan, a former Lewis pupil, said, "He could make you see the world through the eyes of a medieval poet as no other teacher could do. You felt that you had been inside Chaucer's mind after talking to him."