Screwtape is the demon narrator who writes to his nephew in C.S. Lewis’s 1942 novel The Screwtape Letters.
The book is structured as a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to Wormwood, an inexperienced tempter assigned to influence a human patient. Lewis uses this reversed viewpoint to examine temptation, distraction, pride, fear, and self-deception from an ironic perspective.
The Screwtape Letters was first published in book form in 1942. Its unusual epistolary structure makes the senior demon appear to give practical advice, while the reader is expected to recognize the moral danger behind that advice. The work became one of Lewis’s most widely read Christian writings.
Wormwood is the nephew and junior demon, not the letter writer. The name Screwtape is also sometimes confused with fictional demons from other Lewis works, but Screwtape belongs specifically to this sequence of letters. The book’s preface explains Lewis’s discomfort with trying to represent demonic voices directly.