Screwtape represents the senior devil in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The book is structured as a series of letters from Screwtape, an experienced tempter, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood.
Lewis published the work in 1942. Each letter offers advice about influencing a human “patient,” but the advice is presented from the perspective of Hell, allowing Lewis to satirize habits such as self-deception, distraction, vanity, and spiritual complacency.
Wormwood is not the senior figure; he is the junior tempter receiving instructions. That distinction is the central relationship in the book and explains why the title uses Screwtape’s name rather than the nephew’s.
The unusual point of view makes the work different from a conventional theological treatise. Lewis never presents the devils’ claims as reliable moral guidance; instead, readers are expected to infer the opposite lesson from their manipulative strategies. The book became one of Lewis’s best-known works of Christian apologetics.