Stephanie L. Derrick, “The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America” (Oxford UP, 2018)

C. S. Lewis remains one of the most popular religious writers, and one of the most widely discussed children’s writers. I had the chance to catch up with Stephanie L. Derrick about her new book, The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America (Oxford University Press, 2018), and to talk about the many personalities and the changing reputation of her subject. Paying attention to the material circumstances of publication, while thinking about the ways in which reputations are manufactured, contested and renewed, Derrick’s book offers a careful and compelling account of the author of some of the last century’s best-selling works of religious apology and children’s fiction. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).