The Role of the Devil in Paradise Lost, The Bible, Faust and The Devil and Tom WalkerThe Role of the Devil as a Source of Inspiration for Rock-and-Roll it is already well documented and commonly understood. Perhaps less well documented is the Devil's role as an inspiration for literature. The Devil has played an active role in literature for a long time, and his name has appeared in stories for centuries. The historical devil was not always personified. Initially, in religious contexts, it was represented as a feeling or power, present as an evil force, antagonistic to goodness and divinity and a temptation for human beings. While he is not always represented as human, he has always been represented. Indeed, demonstrating that he has always been an ineliminable threatening force, early religious accounts show that his existence actually “precedes the worship of a benign and morally good deity.” In the 1930s, songwriters repeated the tradition of representing the devil as a person. Perhaps the most famous example is Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues," in which the singer describes a dangerous encounter with the devil while hitchhiking. Even in Southern literature, Flannery O'Connor draws on Poe and Hawthorne to illustrate this concept.2 A few centuries of literary evolution have not only reconfigured the devil, but have also shifted the site of his battles from heaven to earth. Essentially, his battles changed arenas three times.3 First, the devil fought God in their once shared home: the arena of Heaven. After this argument, the devil and God competed to win the hearts of men in parables, as in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The third, mo...... middle of the sheet...... Rudwin, p. xi: "[WHEN] Satan was asked to explain the cause of God's enmity... he replied, 'I wanted to be an author.'"16 Carus, p. 407.17 Russell, p. 12.18 Revard, Stella Purce, The War in Heaven (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 234.19 Levine, p. 403.20 Saxon, Lyle and Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1987), p. 80.21 Irving, in Rudwin, p. 31.22 Werblowski, p. 96.23 Caballero, in Rudwin, p. 154.24 Caballero, in Rudwin, p. 161.25 Werblowski, p. 219.26 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, in Rudwin, p. 222.27 Thackeray, William Makepeace, in Rudwin, p. 79.28 Poe, p. 48229 Caballero, in Rudwin, p. 157.30 Carus, pp. 407.31 Carus, p. 7. Furthermore, “…there appears to be no exception to the rule that fear is always the primary inducement to religious worship.” Carus, p. 6.32 Russell, p. 12.33 Rudwin, p. xi.