Screwtape is the fictional demon who writes to his nephew in C.S. Lewis’s 1942 book.
The Screwtape Letters is structured as a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. Screwtape offers advice about tempting a human subject, whom he calls “the Patient.” Lewis uses the reversed perspective to satirize demonic bureaucracy and expose habits he viewed as spiritually destructive.
The book was first published in Britain in 1941 and in the United States in 1942. Its epistolary form gives the reader access to a demonic adviser rather than a conventional narrator. That technique makes the book’s moral observations indirect and often ironic.
Wormwood is the nephew, not the letter writer. Puddleglum and Eustace are characters from the Narnia books, so they belong to a different part of Lewis’s fiction. Screwtape is the title character’s distinctive name.