C.S. Lewis on the unity of his work

On October 29, 1957 Lewis writes to Kathryn Stillwell:

“…you (alone of the critics I’ve met) realise the connection, or even the unity, of all the books – scholarly, fantastic, theological – and make me appear a single author not a man who impersonates half a dozen authors, which is what I seem to most. This wins really very high marks indeed.

I can’t help thinking what “higher critics” centuries from now would think of Lewis; no doubt they’d insist that his work was that of at least “half a dozen authors”.

The above excerpt from Lewis indicates that he viewed his work as a unity, interconnected, and complementary. Lewis’s literary palette has abundant colors, including poetry, essays, short-stories, scholastic literary works, as well as those books familiar to the general (typically Christian) public. Lewis did not write in a vacuum however, his was a life of reading and pondering what was read, it was a life of reading and discussing with others what was read, it was a life of writing and listening to others critique what he’d written, it was a life of interchange and interplay and cross-pollination. Lewis didn’t travel much geographically, in fact, for a man of his renown he hardly traveled at all – but oh that mind of his, but oh that heart, but oh that imagination – C.S. Lewis may well have been one of the most-travelled men who have ever lived.