Screwtape is the fictional demon who writes The Screwtape Letters. He addresses the letters to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter assigned to influence a human patient.
The unusual narrator lets Lewis discuss moral and spiritual problems indirectly. Screwtape presents selfishness, vanity, distraction, and resentment as useful tools, while the reader recognizes that his advice is deliberately unreliable and morally corrupt.
Wormwood is the recipient, not the writer, which is the most common mix-up about the book’s characters. The setting is not the Narnia universe, and Screwtape is not one of Lewis’s talking animals or human villains. The work is a separate Christian satire first published during the Second World War.