Did you know? The devil's letters were born during a dull sermon
The book that made C.S. Lewis famous, years before Narnia, is a correspondence between two demons, and the idea came to him in church.
In July 1940 Lewis was at the midday service in his parish church at Headington Quarry, near Oxford, and the sermon did little for him. In a letter to his brother Warnie, begun on Saturday 20 July and continued the next day, he said that before the service ended an idea for a book had struck him: letters from an elderly retired devil to a young one handling his first "patient". In the same letter he wrote that on the evening of 19 July he had heard one of Hitler's speeches on the radio, and he admitted that while the voice went on it was impossible not to waver a little.
The idea became The Screwtape Letters: 31 letters from Uncle Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, printed weekly from 2 May to 28 November 1941 in The Guardian, an Anglican weekly unrelated to today's daily paper. One country clergyman reportedly cancelled his subscription, finding the advice "positively diabolical".
Published as a book in February 1942, it became Lewis's first big success. He dedicated it to his friend J.R.R. Tolkien.
See also
Sources
- Magdalen College (Oxford), exhibition "C.S. Lewis: Words & Worlds", section "The Screwtape Letters", 2024 (page no longer online).
- Brenton Dickieson, A Pilgrim in Narnia, "How C.S. Lewis Conceived of ‘The Screwtape Letters’", 15 January 2014 (Lewis's letter to his brother of 20 July 1940).
- C.S. Lewis Institute, study guide "The Screwtape Letters" (PDF): Guardian serialisation, cancelled subscription, dedication to Tolkien.
- "Screwtape in Wartime", C.S. Lewis Journal (George Fox University): thirty-one consecutive Fridays from 2 May 1941.