C.S. Lewis used the pen name N.W. Clerk for A Grief Observed.
The book was first published in 1961 under the name N.W. Clerk, shortly after the death of Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman. It presents a series of intensely personal reflections on bereavement, faith, anger, doubt, and the changing experience of mourning. The disguise allowed Lewis to publish the work without immediately placing his private grief under his well-known public name.
A Grief Observed was later reissued under Lewis’s name, making the authorship widely known. The book is not a conventional autobiography or a systematic theological treatise. Instead, it records an unsettled mind trying to understand suffering and the apparent absence of God.
Joy Davidman and Lewis had a civil marriage in 1956 and a Christian marriage ceremony in 1957 after she became seriously ill. She died of cancer in 1960. The book’s direct style is one reason it remains one of Lewis’s most frequently read works for discussions of grief and religious doubt.