Joy Davidman's first publications appeared while she was still an undergraduate at Hunter College. Poetry began to publish her poems in 1936 and, within a year or two, she had joined the Communist Party. Letter to a Comrade, the only collection of her own poems, was published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1938. She spent the latter half of 1939 in Hollywood as an assistant screenwriter for MGM, an experience that led to her writing a number of film reviews for New Masses in the early 1940s. She contributed new poems to her massive anthology War Poems of the United Nations (1943) and to Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944). She wrote two novels, and converted to Christianity after a religious experience in 1946. She divorced her first husband, the Spanish Civil War veteran William Gresham, and married the British writer C.S. Lewis in 1956; the 1993 feature film Shadowlands tells a version of her relationship with Lewis.