Starting with the Forward, Walter Hooper, Coauthor with C. S. Lewis: The Authorized Biography wrote:
The Screwtape Letters is such an established classic that it is difficult to envision a time when, like the sky, it wasn’t there. In fact the idea of the book came to C.S. Lewis while taking Communion in his parish church in Headington Quarry, Oxford, on 14 July 1940. Writing to his brother a few days later, he said, “Before the service was over—one could wish these things came more seasonably—I was struck by an idea for a book which I think might be both useful and entertaining. It would consist of letters from an elderly, retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient’. The idea would be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.” Lewis said that, while he never wrote a book with more ease, twisting his mind into the diabolical attitude almost smothered him before he was done.
But not so with others. During the course of its progress it was read chapter by chapter to his “Inklings” friends, J.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others. They were delighted by the combination of his wit and wisdom; this laughter with learning. And laugh they did, for as R. E. Harvard, Lewis’ doctor, told me, they were “often set rolling with laughter out of their seats”. Now he was sure that it had passed the test of these his friends and most severe critics, and it was published in weekly installments during 1941 in the church newspaper The Guardian.
Such were the Letters’ success that they were seized upon by Geoffrey Bles and published as a whole in 1942, going eight more printings that year. With the book’s publication in 1943 there was yet to be further acclaim, and Lewis was to appear on the front cover of Time magazine in September 1947. The Screwtape Letters was now an international best seller with many foreign translations. The most common reaction to this profound and witty book is the slightly embarrassed “How did Lewis, whom I’ve never met, know me so well?” In anticipation of Screwtape’s fortieth birthday, Collins commissioned the celebrated artist William Papas to illustrate Lewis’s exposition of Hell’s latest novelties and the divine platitudes that are Heaven’s unanswerable answer. Walter Hooper, Coauthor of C. S. Lewis’s: The Authorized Biography pg xi-xii
