C.S. Lewis published The Screwtape Letters in 1942.
The Screwtape Letters is an epistolary work made up of advice from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. The letters describe methods of temptation and self-deception from the demons’ point of view. Lewis uses irony: the demons’ goals reveal the spiritual dangers that the book asks readers to recognize.
The work first appeared in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian, which published the letters between May and November 1941. The book edition followed in 1942. This publication history can cause confusion when people give 1941 as the date, but 1941 refers to the newspaper serialization, while 1942 is the date of the collected book. The work became one of Lewis’s best-known pieces of Christian apologetics and has remained in print in many languages.