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Griffin and His Biography of Lewis
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12190 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1987 |
415 Words |
| Author
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Andrew Shaughnessy
Andrew Shaughnessy is deputy director of Clan Donald Centre,
Isle of Skye, Scotland. |
The author of Clive Staples Lewis - A Dramatic Life was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1935. William Griffin first encountered the work of C.S. Lewis in high school, having been assigned to read The Screwtape Letters, and subsequently at Boston College. Later, Griffin earned a masters degree in theater at the Catholic University of America.
After a short spell with Macmillan, Inc., he spent seven years at Harcourt Brace before returning to Macmillan as an editor in the general books division. Among the books he edited were autobiographies of Cardinal Mindszenty and Mortimer J. Adler; biographies of Cardinal Wolsey and "Tip" O'Neill; four books dealing with Gone with the Wind (Macmillan's best-selling title ever); and several books by or about C.S. Lewis. The Joyful Christian, for example, an anthology of Lewis' writings that Griffin conceived and edited, has sold over 200,000 copies.
The Lewis biography was suggested to Griffin by Macmillan when he left that company in 1980 to resume a writing career in New Orleans. Griffin describes his function at Macmillan as that of a product engineer, attempting to devise works that would have broad appeal. His approach to the Lewis biography was no different. Since Lewis wrote in diverse fields - Christian apologetics, literary criticism, fantasy - Griffin aimed to produce a book that he hoped any Lewis reader would approve, irrespective of his preference for a particular field. The literary form he adopted (a succession of "flashes" of different facets of Lewis' life), he likens to a "rhythm of colors," with something for all on every page.
Griffin stresses that it was not his purpose
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