Explaining the appeal of writers in the past is the bread and butter of historical inquiry, but the late 1940s presents a riddle that few historians would pretend to solve. On September 8, 1947, C. S. Lewis appeared on the cover of Time magazine. This came at a time when the Ulsterman-turned-Oxbridge professor was already familiar to some American readers. Several of Lewis’ imaginative works, for instance, Pilgrim’s Regress (1935), The Screwtape Letters (1943), had been successful. His defense of Christian theism, The Case for Christianity (1943), and The Problem of Pain (1943), also bolstered the author’s reputation. So great was Lewis’ appeal that Hollywood’s Darryl Zanuck hired Henry Luce’s wife, Clair Boothe, to turn The Screwtape Letters into a screenplay. The script went unused. Two years later, Hollywood did bring another popular writer’s best-seller to the silver screen. King Vidor directed The Fountainhead (1949), starring Gary Cooper, and used Ayn Rand’s screenplay adaptation of her own novel. If the movies are any measure of cultural success, Rand’s odd libertarianism appealed to gatekeepers in ways that Lewis’ humanistic Christianity did not.

Mark A. Noll’s C. S. Lewis in America explains how the British author emerged as a mainstay among American readers. The book comes from lectures delivered at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, a research center that features the works of seven British authors, among them Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Each lecture (published with responses) covers Lewis’ initial reception in the United States between 1935 and 1958 in more or less chronological fashion. Noll adds coherence to this chronology by breaking readers of Lewis down into confessional units – Roman Catholic, Protestant, and non-religious. With that order, the book almost writes itself. Roman Catholics were the initial and most cordial interlocutors with Lewis’ varied writings. Then came the reception among nonreligious academics and journalists, followed by Protestants. In what may be one of the biggest surprises in Noll’s history, evangelicals were the last to warm to Lewis’ charms. The reasons for initial evangelical ambivalence have much to do with the lingering effects of the fundamentalist controversy and related worries about liberal Protestant fuzziness.

Positive assessments of Lewis followed the underlying convictions of readers but not to the point of seeing in the British author what reviewers wanted to see. Roman Catholics perceived an author in touch with Christendom broadly defined and their church’s natural law tradition. Although Lewis fell on the wrong side of ecclesiastical authority, “commendation overwhelmed recommendation” especially among Jesuit reviewers. For secular writers, Lewis’ “imaginative creativity” and “ability to effortlessly communicate” foundational Christian truths “in language for the general public as well as for scholars” were reasons to marvel at his output. Among Protestants, mainline readers found that Lewis wrote “brilliantly,” argued “persuasively,” provoked the imagination, and presented Christian orthodoxy “believably.” Evangelicals regarded Lewis as a conservative voice without the trappings or deficiencies of fundamentalism. In 1950, Lewis showed evangelical leaders that Christianity was “fully compatible with advanced learning, literary creativity, frank psychological insight, and even wit.”

These summaries of Lewis’ American audiences’ reactions do not do justice to the specific experiences of readers. Alistair Cooke, who became famous for his BBC radio reports, “Letter from America” and hosting Public Television’s Masterpiece Theater, was one of Lewis’ harshest critics. In a 1944 article for The New Republic, Cooke regarded Lewis’ vogue with alarm. The professor was exploiting “doubting times” to become “a minor prophet, pressed into making a career of reassurance.” For Cooke, Lewis only provided “fantasies,” “befuddlement, and a “patness that murders the issues it pretends to clarify.” On the other side of the aisle, when evangelicals began to pay attention to Lewis for his reassurance, they did so partly because Elisabeth Howard (later Elliot thanks to her marriage to the missionary martyr Jim), a sophomore at Wheaton College in 1946, wrote to her mother about the wonders of Perelandra and Screwtape Letters. Howard’s father, Philip Howard, Jr., was the editor of the popular Sunday School Times, a publication to offer one of the first positive estimates of Lewis’ works to its evangelical audience. Noll estimates that this periodical’s verdict “anticipated the tidal wave of evangelical approval that lay only a few years into the future.”

Perhaps, the most insightful point in this book, though underdeveloped, concerns the era that produced the first audiences for Lewis’ varied writings. During years of hot and cold war, Anglophone readers were receptive to authors who that tapped “the West’s residual Christian culture.” That cultural moment differs from the contemporary world where “Christian communities are the least likely source” for guidance about human purpose and social well-being. In sum, “the public sphere of the 1940s” that launched Lewis’ fame no longer exists.

Even so, compared to other writers such as Ayn Rand, as Noll well explains, Lewis’ relevance endured beyond the era when he became prominent.