In a scene from his one-man-play, An Evening With C. S. Lewis, actor David Payne performs a curious limerick while impersonating the famous Christian apologist. An English author, the pseudo-Lewis opines, can produce beautiful works of literature, bathing in ink and wine. Unfortunately, none of these works are well received by critics or academics. Close to despondency, he mails his works across the sea, and the poem ends, “but in this new land his poems seemed grand; thank God for the U.S.A.”

Payne’s joke captures something essential about C. S. Lewis as a figure: a great deal of his literary and apologetic success came, not from England, but from America. He was still a popular apologist at home, thanks to popular books like The Problem of Pain and his WWII radio talks, but Americans embraced his works aggressively, more perhaps than our rapidly secularizing cousins across the pond, given the difficulty our English friends felt in believing in God after surviving the horrors of six years of total war.

When C. S. Lewis was first profiled by Time Magazine in 1947, he became nationally renowned as a global leader in Christian apologetics, and his subsequently published Chronicles of Narnia books became an international sensation. A large majority of Lewis’s personal correspondence and fan mail for the duration of his life ended up coming from the US. This even came full circle in Lewis’s private life when he married Joy Davidman, a former American communist turned Christian poet. Davidman was a fan who had opened up a correspondence with him after reading The Screwtape Letters.

To this day, Americans remain among Lewis’s most dedicated readers. Among them are the fine folks at the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College, which has become a global center in academic studies of the collective works of Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, and other leading mid-century Christian figures like Dorothy Sayers, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. The Wade Center has the honor of guarding many of the most valuable treasures of Lewis’s earthly life, including the majority of his private book collection and personal papers, as well as Lewis’s childhood wardrobe.

In early 2022, emeritus Professor Mark A. Noll delivered the Wade Center’s prestigious annual Ken and Jean Hansen Lecture Series—delivering three lectures called C. S. Lewis and America: Lessons for Today from the Early American Reception of C. S. Lewis’s Books, exploring the period before 1947 when C. S. Lewis was still an intellectual oddity and not a celebrity. These lectures have since been condensed and edited into the book C. S. Lewis In America: Readings and Reception, 1937–1947.

Professor Noll’s book, being adapted from lectures, is quite brisk and fascinating, neatly divided into three chapters that explore the ways Catholic, Protestant, and secular audiences respectively received and grappled with Lewis’s ideas for the first time.

Lewis’s first major publication as an apologist was The Pilgrim’s Regress, which was released to American audiences in October 1935. In the 12 years that followed, 17 of his books would make their way across the Atlantic Ocean, including The Problem of Pain, The Allegory Of Love, Preface to Paradise Lost, The Space Trilogy, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, Abolition of Man, and the early shorter multi-volume editions of what would become Mere Christianity.

As Noll argues, the reception of Lewis’s books can only be fully understood when we grapple with the state of American Christianity at the time of their publications. The faith at the time was already severely divided and dying. The pre-Vatican II Catholic Church in America was struggling as a religion mostly composed of culturally adhering immigrants, with limited intellectual ambitions among the laity and clergy. Conversely, Protestantism was at the height of the Modernist-Fundamentalist schisms that would come to devastate the mainline denominations and foster the expansion of non-denominational evangelicalism.

This was an era dominated by pervasive national crises—first the Depression, then World War II, and then uncertainties after the war about charting a national course as the world’s dominant superpower. These same years also witnessed a critical cultural transition—from a past in which Christian values could be more or less taken for granted by wide swaths of the American people to a future in which those values became increasingly contested.

Lewis’s emergence marked a needed shot in the arm for American Christians at the time, providing clarity, orthodox thinking, imagination, courage, and humor at a time when all of these things were in short supply. However, the initial decade before becoming famous was a time in which his work was primarily being examined by academics and book reviewers—despite the runaway success of early bestseller The Screwtape Letters in February 1943.

Despite being a committed Protestant and a member of the Church of England in good standing, Lewis’s earliest fans were largely Roman Catholics. Book reviewers for publications including Commonweal, America, and Thought were the first writers rushing out to praise Lewis. “No other religious or academic constituency treated both popular and academic works so thoroughly,” Noll writes, with 35 notable reviews and essays being published in these outlets years before rival Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian publications began taking them seriously.

Lewis’s books appealed to Roman Catholics much in the same way G. K. Chesterton’s books did up until his death in 1936. He was a stringent defender of objective morality, high church sacramentalism, and orthodox theology, only rarely depicting the faith in terms that were observably Protestant. He was a breadth of fresh air in a time when voices like Fulton Sheen and the pre-Vatican II thought leaders were beginning to arise.

Surprisingly, these books were not initially as well-received among Protestant publications. Fundamentalists and evangelical writers looked upon his books with skepticism, often not fully understanding them. One reviewer for The Christian Herald acknowledged that The Space Trilogy was “out of his depth,” while Presbyterian Guardian contributor Henry Welbon wrongly assumed and claimed in print that Lewis was Roman Catholic after reading The Pilgrim’s Regress and surmising that the book didn’t sound or feel Protestant.

Presbyterian writers in particular seemed to chafe against Lewis’s lack of interest in Reformed theology while still approving of his teachings on suffering, objective morality, and basic apologetics. Meanwhile, fundamentalists were bothered by Lewis’s lack of interest in biblical inerrancy and doctrinal fundamentals. This skepticism would quickly diminish, as Lewis gradually became the “Augustine, Origen, and Aesop of Evangelicalism,” to quote Wheaton College president Phillip Ryken.

Conversely, early Catholic reviewers were glowing at the proficiency of Lewis’s prose, the strength of his moral vision, and his unusual adherence to orthodoxy, with Catholic World contributor Fr. Bernard L. Conway praising The Pilgrim’s Regress as “a devastating critique of modern philosophy, religion, politics, and art.” Most Catholic reviewers viewed Lewis’s works as “flawless from the viewpoint of Catholic doctrine,” in the words of Fordham Professor John F. Dwyer.

However, such proclamations were not unanimous. Several Catholic writers balked at Lewis’s Protestantism, finding that his views on predestination, purgatory, and the authority of the pope cut against church teachings. They chiefly complained about the incompleteness of Lewis’s work, even if it was orthodox by the standards of a layman. Traditionalist Catholics found his works particularly troubling and wearisome, with American Ecclesiastical Review contributor Fr. Joseph Clifford Fenton noting that they lacked “a definite affection for the true Church of Jesus Christ,” and worrying that lay Catholics ought to be more skeptical of reading non-Catholic apologetics.

The most consistent pattern in Lewis’s early reception is that he most appealed to the center. Traditionalists, atheists, socialists, and fundamentalists all critiqued Lewis’s work more harshly than liberal Catholics, liberal Protestants, and political moderates, who tended to be the most receptive to his ideas. He was in many ways a man of the center, disinclined to extremes but grounded in a strong foundation of orthodoxy and objective morality. This put him at odds with factions who wanted him to go further.

Leftist writers for The New Republic and The American Freeman were amongst his earliest and harshest critics, with former BBC journalist Alistair Cooke writing the first unabashedly negative criticism of his work. Cooke argued that the “voguish” Lewis was simply peddling “fantasies” and bourgeois attitudes towards sex and marriage.

However, less extreme secular reviewers quite enjoyed Lewis’s works, with his academic works on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost being broadly praised as excellent works of scholarship and among the best English literary criticism of the time. This early period was not yet groundbreaking, as Lewis was at this point merely one academic in his field, and not a celebrity Christian apologist among Americans—although that reputation would stifle his career at Oxford and necessitate his move to Cambridge in 1954.

Even secular book reviewers for major publications like the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times praised Lewis’s religious fiction as some of the best of its genre. These reviews included notable comments from contemporary American writers like Thomas Merton and W. H. Auden, the latter of whom found The Great Divorce “generally interesting” and “instructive.”

It is certainly possible to overstate just what C. S. Lewis meant at this time in history, given that he wasn’t famous yet. However, Lewis would come to play a vital role in legitimizing Christian fiction following the death of Chesterton, whose fictional works like The Man Who Was Thursday and Father Brown remained the standard of religious fiction at the time. His appeal lay in his ability to use “unorthodox means to spread his orthodoxy,” and that appeal would only grow in later years.

Noll’s greatest contribution in this book comes from his comprehensive research into the records, enabling him to document Lewis’ reception in many different corners. Included in the edition are two appendices that contain the first published American essays on Lewis’s full bibliography of existing works up until this point. Catholic Harvard Professor Charles Bradly published the two pieces in America in 1944, declaring Lewis the “only truly popular champion of orthodoxy” and offering the first serious academic analysis of Lewis’s entire body of works in the US.

In one colorful bit of praise, Bradly writes, “Not many writers nowadays are on such terms of cordial insult with His Infernal Majesty as the Ulster-born professor of English literature at Oxford University, Mr. Clive Staples Lewis, has shown himself to be in what is by now the most phenomenally popular household book of applied religion of the twentieth century, The Screwtape Letters.”

However, Noll is only able to make these points effectively because he has done the historical legwork necessary to understand why Lewis was a man of his time. As Noll argues, Lewis appealed to audiences of differing backgrounds because he was a man arguing for the truth, not merely a truth. Americans at this time had retained enough of their residual faith that such arguments were seriously accepted and debated. This was something that allowed Catholics and Protestants alike to gain a foothold with his work. At its core, it captured the essence of what was true to all who embraced it.

C. S. Lewis remains beloved to this day, even in our more morally relativistic times, as a prophetic voice of orthodoxy. The divides that existed in 1947 are worse now, with Christianity struggling to find its center. Many educated Christians have attempted to follow his path and continue his work through similar intellectual and literary endeavors, but none have ever fully accomplished what he managed to do.

Even so, Lewis remains a model for the kind of saintly figure of intellect and integrity that offers hope to future generations of Christians for a more vital and unified church. As Noll notes, Lewis remained humble and focused on the salvation of his soul and the souls of others as he went about work that others found deeply illuminating and instructive, humbly asking those in his inner circle for honest criticism and their deliverance for his own immortal soul rather than his personal success. Given the fractured nature of our technologically driven politically inflamed world, humility of this sort is vital.

“All who in our different circumstances aspire to speak, write, and publish for the cause of Christ and his kingdom would do well to follow that example,” says Noll.