What is the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1942 book written as a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior tempter?

The Screwtape Letters is C.S. Lewis’s 1942 book written as letters from a senior demon to a junior tempter.

The book presents a fictional correspondence between Screwtape, an experienced demon, and his nephew Wormwood, who is assigned to influence a human patient. Lewis reverses the expected viewpoint: readers see ordinary human habits, temptations, and self-deceptions described from the perspective of Hell’s bureaucracy.

The letters first appeared in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian in 1941, and the collected book followed in 1942. Lewis used satire to examine pride, distraction, resentment, vanity, and spiritual complacency. Because the advice is written by a demon, the book’s apparent praise of harmful behavior is deliberately ironic rather than a statement of Lewis’s own moral views.

The work is fictional and epistolary, meaning it is built from letters rather than conventional chapters. It is not a novel about Narnia, nor is Screwtape a human theologian. Wormwood is the junior tempter, while Screwtape is the older correspondent whose instructions form the book’s structure.