Hooper’s Telltale Letter

On 1 August 1963, while C. S. Lewis was hospitalized, Walter Hooper sent Roger Lancelyn Green a brief letter reporting on Lewis’s condition. That fateful letter was placed in the Bodleian Library by Green, and a researcher there recently discovered that it contains two crucially important sentences:

Major Lewis is expected home in a fortnight. Until then I have been handling Jack’s correspondence.

That factual statement is a smoking gun.

Hooper has been claiming for 25 years now that on Sunday, 14 July 1963, C. S. Lewis hired him to stay on in England as Lewis’s private secretary. This letter is final proof that such was not the case.