Here’s the second show from my new 90 second YouTube “show.” The purpose is to help people briefly learn about significant events in the life of C.S. Lewis.

Note the text version of the show is below, WITH footnotes!

The Screwtape Letters Published (February 9, 1942)

Even though The Screwtape Letters were popular when first presented weekly in 1941 in The Guardian, no one could have predicted how successful it would be as a book. It sold so well that it was reprinted eight times during the first year it was available and the initial run of 2,000 copies even sold out before the release date![1] If fact, it was because of the popularity of this title that Jack was on the cover of Time in 1947. Note that year; it is before any of his Narnia stories (the first come out in 1950). Imagine being known for something else today, but being famous prior to it to be popular enough to grace Time’s cover?

As Jack explained to his brother not long after he came up with the idea for these devilish letters, he wanted “to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.”[2] That differing perspective, of course, is from Screwtape, a senior demon who gives hellish advice to his nephew, Wormwood on his first assignment. Jack paints a picture (humorous at times) of common struggles that Wormwood attempts to take advantage of to mess up the life of his unsuspecting subject.

[1] See George Sayer’s Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis (1994) pg. 254.

[2] July 20, 1940; Collected Letters, v. 2 pg. 426-427.