Clyde Samuel Kilby (26 September 1902, in Johnson City, Tennessee – 18 October 1986, in Columbus, Mississippi) was an American writer and English professor, best known for his scholarship on the Inklings, especially J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
A professor at Wheaton College (Illinois) for most of his life, Kilby founded the Marion E. Wade Center there, making it a center for the study of the Inklings, their friends (such as Dorothy Sayers), and their influences (such as George MacDonald).
Clyde graduated in 1929, and the next year married Martha Harris, a mathematics teacher at JBU.
The fourteen letters of his correspondence with Lewis became the core of a collection of papers on first Lewis, then the Inklings, and finally a set of seven connected British authors: This collection developed into the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, today a major resource for twentieth-century British literature scholarship.
Together, Clyde and Martha Kilby challenged generations of Wheaton students and others to seek the world of the imagination with all their heart and mind.