Screwtape is the senior demon who narrates C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The book takes the form of letters from Screwtape to his junior nephew, Wormwood.
Screwtape advises Wormwood on tempting a human patient away from Christian faith and moral discipline. Lewis uses this inverted perspective for satire: the demons describe destructive habits as if they were professional techniques, allowing readers to recognize the weaknesses being mocked.
The Screwtape Letters was first published in book form in 1942. Lewis originally wrote the work as a series of fictional letters, and its epistolary structure gives the book a distinctive voice. The senior demon’s confidence also creates deliberate irony, because his advice often exposes the ugliness and absurdity of demonic goals.
Wormwood is the junior demon and the recipient, not the narrator. That distinction is the most common character mix-up in questions about the book.