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  • 2021-02-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Did C.S. Lewis Write This ′Old Devil's Letter to the Young'? (en)
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  • C.S. Lewis was a British writer and educator best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven fantasy novels published in the 1950s (the first of which was 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe') and set in the magical land of Narnia, home to mythical beasts and talking animals. In mid-2020, however, Lewis, who died in 1963, was attributed as the author of a piece titled Old Devil's Letter to the Young or The Devil's Letters to His Nephew, a work said to have been published in 1942, but seemingly quite prescient in anticipating both the COVID-19 pandemic that began several decades later and the resistance to social distancing measures enacted to slow its spread: The format and putative dating of the passage quoted above suggest The Screwtape Letters, a 1942 novel that is Lewis' most popular book outside of the Narnia series and comprises a series of letters from a demon (Screwtape) to his nephew (Wormwood): However, the passage in question about souls being led to Hell by their fear of disease does not appear in The Screwtape Letters, nor in or any other writing or work authored by Lewis. Like another statement falsely attributed to Lewis in 2020, this item is a 21st century fabrication that attempted to put contemporaneous commentary about the COVID-19 pandemic into the mouth of a respected writer from the previous century. (en)
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