The Screwtape Letters

On its first appearance, The Screwtape Letters was immediately recognized as a milestone in the history of popular theology. Now, in it’s 70th Anniversary Year, and having sold over half a million copies, it is an iconic classic on spiritual warfare and the power of the devil.

This profound and striking narrative takes the form of a series of letters from Screwtape, a devil high in the Infernal Civil Service, to his nephew Wormwood, a junior colleague engaged in his first mission on earth trying to secure the damnation of a young man who has just become a Christian. Although the young man initially looks to be a willing victim, he changes his ways and is ‘lost’ to the young devil.

Dedicated to Lewis’s friend and colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, The Screwtape Letters is a timeless classic on spiritual warfare and the invisible realities which are part of our religious experience.

Reviews

‘The book is sparkling yet truly reverent, in fact a perfect joy, and should become a classic.’
The Guardian

‘Excellent, hard-hitting, challenging, provoking.’
The Observer

About the author

Born in Ireland in 1898, Clive Staples Lewis gained a triple First at Oxford and was Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College from 1925-54, where among others he was a contemporary of Tolkien. In 1954 he became Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. Lewis was for many years an atheist. He describes his conversion in Surprised by Joy: "In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God… perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." One of the most gifted and influential Christian writers of our time, he is also celebrated for his Narnia chronicles and his literary criticism and science fiction. C S Lewis died on 22nd November 1963.