Which 1955 memoir by C.S. Lewis describes his early life and return to Christianity?

Surprised by Joy is C.S. Lewis’s 1955 memoir about his early life and return to Christianity.

Published in 1955, Surprised by Joy traces Lewis’s childhood, education, intellectual development, experience in the First World War, and movement from atheism toward Christianity. The title refers to “joy,” a term Lewis used for an intense and elusive longing that he connected with experiences of imagination, nature, and literature.

The memoir is not a complete record of every event in Lewis’s life. It is shaped around the development of his ideas and spiritual experience, so readers should not treat it as a conventional day-by-day autobiography. Lewis also changed or simplified some personal details in his published account.

The book ends with his embrace of Christianity rather than covering his entire later career. A Grief Observed, by contrast, concerns his grief after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, and was published under a pseudonym in 1961.