Screwtape narrates C.S. Lewis’s 1942 satire The Screwtape Letters through a series of letters offering demonic advice. Screwtape is a senior tempter who instructs his inexperienced nephew Wormwood on how to mislead a human “patient.”
Lewis presents the correspondence as an inverted guide to temptation. Everyday distractions, irritability, vanity and self-deception become tools in Screwtape’s strategy. Because the advice is presented from a demon’s perspective, readers are meant to recognize the moral errors hidden inside apparently ordinary habits.
The book began as a series of newspaper installments before appearing in book form. Lewis later expressed discomfort with the sustained demonic viewpoint, but the work became one of his most popular pieces of Christian satire. Its fictional letters are often quoted because they dramatize psychological and ethical ideas in memorable, ironic language.