What is the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1942 Christian satire featuring Screwtape?
Answer
The Screwtape Letters
The Screwtape Letters is C.S. Lewis’s 1942 Christian satire featuring the demon Screwtape.
The book is structured as a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. Screwtape offers advice on tempting a human being, but his confident explanations expose the selfishness, vanity, and self-deception of the demonic viewpoint. Lewis uses inversion: readers learn about spiritual dangers by hearing a devil describe his methods.
The work first appeared in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian, where it was published as a serial during 1941 and 1942. It became one of Lewis’s most popular theological books, despite its unusual comic form.
It is often grouped with Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, but those books use direct apologetic argument rather than a sustained fictional correspondence between demons.