The Screwtape Letters

C.S. Lewis's satirical classic takes the form of thirty-one letters from Screwtape, a senior devil in Hell's civil service, to his bumbling young nephew Wormwood, who has been assigned to secure the damnation of an ordinary Englishman known only as "the Patient." With dry, bureaucratic relish, Screwtape coaches Wormwood in the fine art of temptation — not through spectacular sins, but through distraction, vanity, resentment, spiritual laziness, and the small daily compromises that steer a soul away from God.

Because everything is narrated from the devils' inverted point of view, "the Enemy" is God and success means a human's ruin, a device that lets Lewis examine faith, virtue, and self-deception from a mischievous slant. Set against the anxieties of wartime Britain, the correspondence is by turns very funny and quietly piercing.

One of Lewis's most beloved and enduring works, The Screwtape Letters remains a sharp, accessible meditation on temptation and the moral life. This entry is often published together with its short 1959 sequel, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast."