Screwtape is the senior demon writing the letters in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.
The book is presented as a series of correspondence from Screwtape to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to tempt a human patient, and Lewis uses the reversed viewpoint to satirize temptation, self-deception, pride, and spiritual complacency.
The work was first published in book form in 1942 after appearing in installments in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian. Lewis’s fictional letters are not written as a handbook endorsing demonic ideas; their irony depends on readers recognizing that the demons’ advice is morally corrupt and often absurd.
Wormwood is the junior demon and the recipient, not the author, of the letters. Glubose is another demon mentioned in the correspondence. The naming structure is therefore useful for separating the central writer from the supporting infernal characters.