What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1942 book of letters from a demon to a human?

The Screwtape Letters is C.S. Lewis’s 1942 book of fictional letters from a demon to a human.

The narrator, Screwtape, is a senior demon who writes advice to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. The letters discuss temptation, distraction, pride, resentment, and spiritual complacency from the imagined perspective of Hell. The human subject is usually called “the Patient,” while the demonic authorities refer to God as “the Enemy.”

Lewis wrote the work during the Second World War, and the letters first appeared in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian. They were later collected and published as a book in 1942. Lewis used satire and reversal: readers are invited to recognize ordinary moral weaknesses by seeing them described as demonic strategies.

The book is often grouped with Lewis’s Christian apologetic works, but its fictional form distinguishes it from Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. It remains one of his most widely read explorations of temptation and self-deception.