Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for Best Biography.

I had heard about the Inklings, the group of writers who met regularly in an Oxford pub and in C.S Lewis's rooms at Oxford. They were all writers who were interested in spiritual matters. The meetings on Thursday evening involved reading to each other from recent works and also conversation, arguments and beer. The main three Inklings were Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. I have read much of Lewis and Tolkien's writings but not Charles Williams. After reading The Inklings Williams is on my to read list. I was interested to learn from this book that while they were not regular members of the Inklings other writers visited at times on those Thursday nights. Among the others were Dorothy Sayers and T.S. Elliot. These people were friends but they did not always get along. The saddest part of the book I thought was to learn about the drifting apart of Lewis and Tolkien who had been the closest of friends for many years but saw little of each other in the last ten years of Lewis' life. There have been other books about this gathering of writers. I don't know if they are better or more thorough than Humphrey Carpenter's. ( )

Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends recounts the Oxford University literary club whose members included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield, among many others, that met at the Eagle and Child Pub between the early 1930s and late 1949. The work, like Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, examines the men’s work as well as the significance of the place. Carpenter ultimately concludes that C.S. Lewis was key to the Inklings’ existence. He writes, “…the Inklings were just one more Oxford club. Yet they were certainly more than that to Jack Lewis” (pg. 161). Even R.E. Havard concluded that the club was “simply a group of C.S.L.’s wide circle of friends who lived near enough to him to meet together fairly regularly” and that many later historians take them “much more seriously than [they] took [themselves]” (pg. 161). As to literary influence, Carpenter argues that Lewis “alone can be said to have been ‘influenced’ by the others (he was as Tolkien said ‘an impressionable man’), but for the rest it is sufficient to say that they came together because they already agreed about certain things” (pg. 160). Tolkien also referred to the group as “the Lewis séance” (pg. 171). Carpenter’s The Inklings is great literary biography for scholars of Lewis’ and Williams’ work, though he spends less time on Tolkien having already written a biography of Tolkien. ( )

This is the definitive biography of the Inklings. Carpenter does a wonderful job giving the story of the group and the stages of their evolution. ( )

Fascinating. I am learning a lot that I did not know.