What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1940 book defending Christianity through the problem of suffering?

The Problem of Pain was C.S. Lewis’s 1940 book defending Christianity through the problem of suffering.

Published during the Second World War, The Problem of Pain addresses a classic theological question: how suffering can exist if God is good and powerful. Lewis discusses divine goodness, human freedom, pain, hell, and the Fall within a broadly Christian framework. It is an argument about the intellectual problem of evil rather than a personal diary of grief.

That distinction matters because Lewis later wrote A Grief Observed after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. The later book is intimate and emotionally unsettled, whereas The Problem of Pain is a structured work of apologetics written before that bereavement.

The book helped establish Lewis as a major popular Christian writer. Its wartime publication also placed his arguments in a period when questions about suffering had immediate public importance. Although it remains widely read, it presents a theological case rather than a simple answer to every individual experience of pain.