All kinds of things went into the making of Narnia. There was the intriguing question asked him by one of the evacuees, who wanted to know whether there was anything behind the big old wardrobe that stood in The Kilns. And there were memories of his own childhood: how he and his brother, Warnie, used to climb into that very wardrobe -- made by their grandfather -- and tell each other stories in the dark.

Some of Jack's imagination came from the books he had loved when he was young: the talking animals of Beatrix Potter; the Nesbit; the wicked queen from a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale; the dwarfs of the old German myths; Irish fairy tales, myths and legends; and the mythological creatures from the legends of ancient Greece. But these were just some of the ingredients; what Jack did was mix them -- together with the elements of his Christian belief -- into an entirely new and original recipe.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950 with illustrations by Pauline Baynes, a young artist who perfectly captured, in line, the pictures that Jack Lewis had seen in his head. By that time, Jack had already started writing more stories about how the four children found their way back into Narnia. In Prince Caspian (1951) and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), Jack experimented with the differences in time between our world and Narnia -- a device that meant that there was always something unusual and unexpected about each new story.