The Screwtape Letters

Screwtape, a senior and thoroughly bureaucratic devil, writes thirty one letters of advice to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter assigned to secure the soul of an unnamed young Englishman the letters refer to only as the Patient. Lewis structures the whole novel as this one sided correspondence, so a reader has to infer the Patient's actual life, his conversion to Christianity just before the letters begin, his uneasy relationship with his mother, his growing love for a devout young woman, entirely through Screwtape's contemptuous commentary on it. Screwtape's counsel is patient and almost administrative rather than dramatic, urging Wormwood to work through the Patient's small vanities, his boredom in church, his casual cruelty to his mother, rather than through any single dramatic sin, since Screwtape insists that ordinary daily neglect damns more souls than any grand transgression does. Wormwood, impatient and prone to blaming his own failures on his nephew's incompetence, keeps pushing for faster results and keeps drawing Screwtape's scorn for it. The Patient is killed during a London air raid partway through the Blitz, dies still faithful to the belief Wormwood was assigned to destroy, and the novel's final letter is Screwtape's furious verdict on his nephew's failure, closing with Wormwood himself marked for punishment by the very infernal bureaucracy he serves.

Lewis writes the whole book in Screwtape's voice alone, and the joke of the form, a devil describing goodness as an enemy tactic and faith as an infuriating inconvenience, does most of the persuasive work a direct sermon never could. It reads quickly, in short chapters built for one sitting each, and its comedy, dry and administrative rather than broad, is sharper than readers expect from a book about temptation and damnation. Lewis himself said afterward that writing sustained cynicism from a devil's point of view left him drained and that he had resolved never to attempt another Letter, a claim his own sequel seventeen years later did not entirely honor.

The letters ran first as a weekly series in the Anglican newspaper The Guardian between May and November 1941 before Geoffrey Bles collected them into a book in February 1942. Lewis dedicated it to his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, and it has never been out of print since.