In this era of European history, Germany fell under the control of the Fascist dictator Adolph Hitler, who used his charisma and fiery rhetoric to persecute the Jewish race and rebuild the German military. While Screwtape repeatedly tells Wormwood to avoid talking about specific historical events of any kind, it is clear that the patient is living in England during World War II.

The Chronicles of Narnia, along with Lewis’s writings on Christianity, remain enormously popular more than half a century after his death. Although his fiction writing made Lewis wealthy in his later years, he continued to teach medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and later Cambridge University. He also wrote the popular Space Trilogy (1938-1945). In the next five years, Lewis authored six other books about Narnia, collectively known as the Chronicles of Narnia. The experience of moving from London to the countryside forms the premise of Lewis’s most famous book, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, (1949) the first novel he wrote about the fantastical world of Narnia. It was also at this time that he sheltered children from London in his house in the English countryside. Lewis first delivered these lectures via radio broadcast during the Second World War. For the remainder of his life, Lewis was a vocal proponent of Christian values, authoring such famous Christian texts as Mere Christianity, a serious of short lectures on Christian values and the existence of God. In the late 1920s, when Lewis was in his early thirties, he converted to the Anglican Church, based on his studies of classical Christian texts and his friendship with such Christian thinkers as George Macdonald. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Lewis worked as a professor at Oxford’s Magdalen College, teaching medieval and classical studies. Lewis ultimately graduated Oxford with a “triple first” in English, Classics, and Philosophy, an extremely prestigious achievement both then and now. While still an undergraduate, Lewis fought in World War I, a traumatic experience that made him an atheist throughout his twenties. He excelled at Latin and Greek in school, and won a prestigious scholarship to Oxford University. As a child and teenager, Lewis was fascinated by fantasy writing. His father was a Welsh solicitor and his mother was the daughter of an Anglican priest-Lewis’s early exposure to Christianity would influence his writing and thinking for the rest of his life.

The screwtape letters by cs lewis