The stories in this book began as a series of pictures in the author's head. "At first," wrote C. S. Lewis, "they were not a story, just pictures." The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe began with a mental image of a snowy wood with a little goat-footed faun scurrying along carrying an umbrella and a pile of parcels. "This picture," he later recalled, "had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then, one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: 'Let's try to make a story about it . . .' "

Clive Staples Lewis (or as he was always known to his friends, "Jack") was already an established writer of serious books on literature and religion, but, as a bachelor who didn't know many children, he had never thought of writing a book for young readers. Then, during the Second World War, when children from London were being evacuated to the country, four youngsters were billeted at Jack's home, the Kilns. Surprised to find how few imaginative stories his young guests seemed to know, he decided to write one for them and scribbled down the opening sentences of a story about four children -- then named Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter -- who were sent away from London because of the air raids, and went to stay with a very old professor who lived by himself in the country.

That's all he wrote at the time, but, several years later, he returned to the story. The children (now named Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) found their way into another world -- a land he would eventually call Narnia. As Jack wrote, more pictures came into his mind: one was of "a queen on a sledge"; the other was of "a magnificent lion." He wasn't sure for some time what the story was about. "But then," as he later put it, "suddenly Aslan came bounding in . . .I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there, he pulled the whole story together."