Who wrote The Screwtape Letters?

C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, a satirical Christian work first published in book form in 1942. It presents a series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood.

The fictional correspondence reverses the usual advice format: Screwtape explains how to tempt a human being and undermine spiritual life. Lewis used that reversal to discuss pride, distraction, resentment, self-deception, and the habits that shape moral decisions.

The book began as a series of pieces associated with wartime broadcasting and was published during the Second World War. Its epistolary structure makes it different from Lewis’s novels and from his more direct apologetic books. The work is not a handbook of demonology; it is a literary satire written from an intentionally imagined demonic viewpoint.

J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams were Lewis’s friends in the Inklings, but neither wrote The Screwtape Letters. Lewis alone is credited as its author.