Wormwood receives Screwtape’s letters in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.
Wormwood is a junior tempter working to corrupt a human known only as the Patient. His uncle Screwtape, a senior demon and administrator in Hell’s bureaucracy, sends him advice about exploiting the Patient’s habits, fears, relationships, and intellectual distractions.
The book never presents Wormwood’s replies directly. Readers reconstruct his progress from Screwtape’s responses, corrections, and complaints. That one-sided correspondence gives the satire its distinctive structure and makes Screwtape’s confident advice increasingly revealing.
Wormwood should not be confused with Screwtape, who is the letter writer, or with the Patient, who is the human subject of the demonic campaign. Nor is Wormwood a character from Lewis’s Narnia books. The Screwtape Letters belongs to Lewis’s modern religious satire and was written during the Second World War, when Lewis was also becoming widely known for his broadcast talks on Christianity.