“Of all my books,” Lewis admitted in a 1963 interview, “there was only one I did not take pleasure in writing.” He found The Screwtape Letters “dry and gritty going. The outraged church official wrote the editor to complain that “much of the advice given in these letters … not only erroneous but positively diabolical.” 6. Evidently, this fellow mistook Screwtape for an actual (and terrible) theologian doling out sincere spiritual tips. Some Readers Didn’t Understand That the Letters Were Satirical.ĭuring their run in The Guardian, one angry clergyman canceled his subscription. Lewis biographer under the sun believes that she was also, in fact, a caricature of Mrs. Wormwood’s mortal “client” has an exacting mother who’s described as “a positive terror to hostesses and servants.” Almost every C.S. “She … interfered constantly with his work,” Warren recalled, “and imposed upon him a heavy burden of minor domestic tasks.” In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’ fiction clearly borrowed from his reality. Lewis’ older brother, Warren, was disgusted by her manipulative, “insincere” personality. After the war, Lewis moved in with and tended to her. Paddy ultimately died on the French front, leaving Janie King Moore behind. In WWI, he and a comrade named Paddy Moore agreed that if either man should perish, the other would take care of his surviving parent (both had already lost one-Lewis’s mother succumbed to cancer in 1908). Lewis wasn’t the sort who would go back on a promise made to a fallen friend. One of the Human Characters Was Probably Based on a Woman Lewis Lived With. Refusing payment, he insisted that a fund dedicated to the widows of Church of England clergymen receive this money instead. The Guardian offered Lewis two pounds per letter. The Newspaper Proceeds Helped a Charitable Cause. Readers devoured them en masse, and before long, publisher Geoffrey Bles converted Lewis’ series into a book. Every week, another hellish correspondence would appear, until the last one hit the stands on November 28. Having already submitted material to a now-defunct Anglican gazette called The Guardian, Lewis was in good standing with its editor, who released the first “Screwtape Letter” on May 2, 1941. Originally, These Dispatches Ran as a Serial. Inspired, the author worked at breakneck speed, frequently knocking out an entire letter in one sit-down session. In July 1940, Lewis came up with the idea of a senior demon named Screwtape mailing trade secrets and frank pointers to his greenhorn nephew, Wormwood, who has been charged with corrupting a human soul. It Took Lewis A Little Over Six Months to Write All 31 Letters. Here are 12 little-known facts about The Screwtape Letters, its development, and its enduring impact. Lewis’s most popular non-Narnia novel is a delicious, perceptive treatise on the weaknesses of human nature.

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