Which author received the dedication of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters?

J.R.R. Tolkien received the dedication of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.

Lewis dedicated the 1942 book to Tolkien, his close friend and fellow member of the Inklings. The dedication is famously playful and addresses Tolkien directly, while also acknowledging disagreements about the book’s style and subject.

The Screwtape Letters presents a series of fictional letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. The letters reverse the viewpoint: advice about temptation is used to expose human weaknesses and examine Christian moral ideas.

Tolkien and Lewis met at Oxford and became important readers of each other’s work. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Narnia books developed separately, so the dedication does not mean Tolkien wrote or co-authored The Screwtape Letters.