The role of the devil in paradise lost, the Bible, Faust and the devil and Tom WalkerThe role of the devil as an inspiration for rock and roll is already well documented and commonly understood. The role of the Devil as a source of inspiration for literature is perhaps less well documented. The Devil has long played an active role in literature and his name has appeared in stories for centuries. The historical devil has not always been personified. Initially, in religious contexts, it was represented as a feeling or power, present as the force of evil, an antagonist of good and divinity and a temptation to humans. Although he is not always depicted as human, he has always been depicted. In fact, demonstrating that it has always been an indelible threatening force, early religious accounts show that its existence "actually precedes the worship of a benevolent and morally good deity."1 Much later, certainly around the time of blues of the 1920s and In the 1930s, songwriters repeated the tradition of depicting 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. In southern literature, Flannery O'Connor also drew inspiration from Poe and Hawthorne to illustrate this2. A few centuries of literary evolution have not only reconfigured the devil, but they have moved the locus 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 dispute, the devil and God competed to conquer the hearts of men in parables, such as in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The third, the mo...... middle of paper ...... 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, War in Paradise (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, p. 407.31 Carus, p. 7. Furthermore, “...there seems to be no exception to the rule that fear is always the first incitement to religious worship. » Carus, p. 6.32 Russell, p. 12.33Rudwin, p. xi.