Screwtape narrates C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters through letters addressed to the junior tempter Wormwood.
The 1942 book is structured as correspondence from Screwtape, an experienced demon, to Wormwood, his inexperienced nephew. Screwtape offers advice about tempting a human patient and preventing that person from becoming a Christian. The demonic viewpoint lets Lewis present moral and theological ideas through satire and inversion.
Lewis wrote the letters during the Second World War, and they first appeared in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian. The fictional correspondence was later published as a book. Its tone is witty, strategic, and deliberately unsettling because virtues are discussed as obstacles and selfishness as a useful tactic.
Readers sometimes confuse Screwtape and Wormwood because both are demons in the same correspondence. Screwtape is the senior adviser and letter writer; Wormwood is the junior tempter who receives the instructions. Lewis later wrote a short epilogue, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.”