Which C.S. Lewis book is a collection of letters written by a senior demon to his nephew Wormwood?

The Screwtape Letters is C.S. Lewis’s collection of letters from a senior demon to his nephew Wormwood.

The book was published in 1942. Its narrator, Screwtape, is an experienced tempter who advises the inexperienced Wormwood on how to influence a human subject. Lewis uses the reversed viewpoint to expose habits, distractions, pride, and self-deception that he presents as spiritually dangerous.

Although the letters are comic and satirical, their structure depends on a serious theological premise. Screwtape’s advice is consistently unreliable because it is designed to advance demonic purposes. Readers must therefore interpret his claims as part of the satire rather than as Lewis’s direct description of Christian teaching.

The work began as a series of pieces written for publication in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian. Lewis later collected them as a book. The Screwtape Letters is not an epistolary exchange between Lewis and a real correspondent, and Wormwood is a fictional demon rather than a historical person.