Screwtape is the senior demon who writes the letters in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The book uses a fictional correspondence to present advice on tempting a human being away from faith and moral discipline.
Screwtape addresses the letters to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood, who has been assigned to influence a particular human called the Patient. The unusual viewpoint lets Lewis satirize self-deception, distraction, pride, rivalry, and other ordinary human weaknesses.
Lewis wrote the work during the Second World War, and it was first published in book form in 1942. Readers sometimes confuse the two demon names: Screwtape is the writer and mentor, while Wormwood is the junior tempter receiving instructions.