Screwtape wrote the letters collected in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.
The 1942 book is presented as a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. The letters offer advice on tempting a human being, whom Screwtape calls “the Patient.” Lewis uses this reversed viewpoint to satirize human weaknesses and explore moral and spiritual habits.
Wormwood is the recipient, not the author, of the letters. That distinction is central to the book’s fictional structure and is a frequent source of mistaken answers. Lewis never presents the demons’ advice as sound; the satire exposes the distortions in their reasoning.
The book first appeared in Britain in 1942 and became one of Lewis’s most widely read works. Its epistolary form, comic tone, and theological ideas make it different from a conventional narrative novel, even though it has recurring fictional characters.