What is the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1955 autobiography about his return to faith?

C.S. Lewis’s 1955 autobiography about his return to faith is titled Surprised by Joy. The book traces his intellectual and spiritual development from childhood through his return to Christianity.

Lewis describes his early love of myth, his movement toward atheism, and the experiences that gradually changed his understanding of belief. The title refers to a powerful longing or sudden experience of joy that Lewis connected with imaginative desire and, eventually, religious understanding.

Surprised by Joy is not a conventional day-by-day memoir. It focuses more on ideas, books, friendships, and turning points than on a complete account of every period in Lewis’s life. The narrative ends before some of his best-known public writing and before his marriage to Joy Davidman.

The title is sometimes confused with A Grief Observed, which records Lewis’s response to Davidman’s death, or The Pilgrim’s Regress, a fictional allegory about belief. Surprised by Joy is the autobiographical work among these titles.