In 1667, a blind poet in London published a 10,000-line epic about the war in Heaven, the fall of the angels, and the creation of humanity. The poem was supposed to “justify the ways of God to men.” It did something else instead.
It made the Devil the most interesting character in English literature.
John Milton was fifty-eight and completely blind since 1652. He dictated Paradise Lost in daily bursts to amanuenses and family members. He was paid five pounds for the manuscript, with another five promised when the first printing sold out. The poem’s God speaks in sermons, its angels in hymns. Satan speaks in the kind of rhetoric that makes you lean forward in your chair.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”
That line has been quoted for 350 years because it is psychologically true. Milton gave Satan the best speeches in the poem and the most human interior life. Whether he intended this is one of literary criticism’s oldest arguments. William Blake settled it in 1790 with a sentence from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley agreed. In his A Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840), he argued that Milton’s Satan possesses an energy and magnificence that makes the poem’s God look like a tyrant. The Romantics did not worship Satan. They recognized that Milton had accidentally created the template for every literary antihero that followed: the rebel who loses the war but wins the argument.
Before Milton: The Devil in Chains
Satan was not always allowed to talk.
In Dante’s Inferno (c. 1314), the Devil sits frozen in the ice at the bottom of Hell, a monstrous three-faced figure chewing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. He does not speak. He is not a character. He is punishment made flesh, a silent engine of suffering. Dante’s theology permitted no sympathy for the fallen. The Devil was not interesting. He was a fact.
The medieval mystery plays gave demons more personality. The Hell-mouth scenes in English mystery cycles (Chester, York, Wakefield) featured devils who bickered and complained about their assignments. These demons were clowns. They made audiences laugh, not think.
Christopher Marlowe changed the equation. In Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), Mephistopheles is melancholy and disturbingly honest. When Faustus asks why he has left Hell, Mephistopheles answers: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” It is a line that anticipates Milton by seventy years. The demon is not posturing. He is describing a psychological condition: damnation as a permanent state of awareness. Marlowe cracked the door. Milton kicked it open.
One other predecessor deserves mention: the Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel, whose play Lucifer (1654) dramatized the rebellion in Heaven thirteen years before Paradise Lost. Whether Milton knew Vondel’s work is debated. Both were working from the same Genesis material. Both gave Lucifer the same motivation: wounded pride and the refusal to serve.
The Devil Gets a Voice
After Milton, writers realized something. If you put the Devil on the page and let him talk, he could say things no human character could get away with.
Alain-Rene Lesage exploited this in Le Diable boiteux (The Limping Devil, 1707), based on Luis Velez de Guevara’s Spanish novel El Diablo Cojuelo (1641). A student frees the demon Asmodeus from a bottle, and in return Asmodeus lifts the rooftops of Madrid to reveal what people do when they think no one is watching. The device is pure social satire: adultery, greed, pretension, all visible to a demon who finds human behavior amusing.
Jacques Cazotte took a different approach in Le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love, 1772). Here the Devil is a seducer, appearing first as a camel’s head, then as a page boy, then as a beautiful woman. The novel influenced the entire lineage of Romantic supernatural fiction and the tradition of the Devil as a shape-shifting presence in human affairs.
In Germany, Jean Paul published Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren (Selections from the Devil’s Papers) in 1789. The title tells you the format: documents written by Satan, satirizing contemporary society. The German literary tradition was developing a particular appetite for the Devil as social critic, a tendency that reached its peak with a twenty-three-year-old writer from Stuttgart.
Hauff’s Devil: The Masterpiece of a Dead Man
Wilhelm Hauff was born on 29 November 1802 in Stuttgart. He died on 18 November 1827, eight days after the birth of his daughter, of typhoid fever. He was twenty-four years old. In that short life he produced a body of work that most writers twice his age would envy: three almanacs of fairy tales (including Kalif Storch, Der kleine Muck, Zwerg Nase, and Das kalte Herz), a historical novel (Lichtenstein, 1826, modeled on Walter Scott), a literary scandal, and a two-volume satirical novel narrated by Satan.
The novel is Mitteilungen aus den Memoiren des Satan (Selections from the Memoirs of Satan). Volume one appeared in 1826, published anonymously by the Franckh press in Stuttgart. Volume two followed in 1827.
Hauff had studied theology at the Tubinger Stift, the same seminary that had housed Hegel, Schelling, and Holderlin a generation earlier. After completing his studies in 1824, he became a tutor to the children of the von Hugel family, a position that gave him access to the household’s library, time to write, and a front-row seat to the German middle class he later satirized.
In the novel, Satan arrives in the human world disguised as Herr von Natas, an anagram so transparent that its very brazenness is the joke. He enrolls at a German university and proceeds to tour the institutions of Restoration-era society. Professors pontificate on nothing. Critics shred books they have not read, and the bourgeoisie perform respectability while scheming underneath. In Berlin, he encounters the Wandering Jew. He visits Goethe. He dismantles the pretensions of literary criticism, academic philosophy, and political censorship with the detached amusement of someone who has watched civilizations rise and collapse for millennia.
The prose is sharp and funny. Hauff was twenty-three and already understood that the most devastating criticism looks like amusement. Satan does not rage against human folly. He describes it precisely, and the reader does the raging.
The novel also contains Hauff’s theory of why the device works. Satan has been alive forever and answers to no social convention. He can say what everyone thinks and no one dares to say. Four centuries of writers have independently discovered the same trick.
Hauff’s other great literary act was a deliberate provocation. In 1825, he wrote Der Mann im Mond (The Man in the Moon) as a pixel-perfect imitation of the popular sentimental novelist H. Clauren (pen name of Carl Heun) and published it under Clauren’s name. When Heun discovered the hoax and sued, Hauff responded with a public essay, Die Bucher und die Lesewelt (Books and the Reading Public), arguing that if a style can be perfectly imitated, it has no real substance. Hauff lost the civil damages suit but had already proved his point. The affair made him famous across Germany.
He became editor of the Morgenblatt fur gebildete Stande (Morning Paper for the Educated Classes) in January 1827. Ten months later, he was dead. His daughter was born eight days before his death. His wife was twenty-two.
The fairy tales survived because children loved them. Scholars kept the criticism alive. The Memoirs of Satan survived because the format Hauff perfected, the Devil as first-person social critic, turned out to be the most versatile narrative device in European literature. Every subsequent devil-narrator owes him something, whether the writers know it or not.
Selections from the Memoirs of Satan: Volume Two continues the tradition. Both volumes are now available in English translation, separately or as a combined edition.
The Ghost-Hoffmann and the German Gothic
Hauff was not the only German writer of his era building stories around the Devil. E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) had published Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs) in 1815-1816, a novel about a monk who drinks a mysterious potion and is drawn into a cycle of sin, madness, and doppelgangers.
Popular accounts often claim Hoffmann earned the nickname “Devil-Hoffmann” for his diabolical fiction. This is wrong. His actual nickname was “Gespenster-Hoffmann”: Ghost-Hoffmann. The name came from his spectral stories, his obsession with doubles and automata, the uncanny rather than the infernal. Hoffmann’s Devil was a psychological force, an externalization of guilt and compulsion, rather than the witty social observer that Hauff would create.
The distinction matters. Hoffmann wrote Gothic fiction, interior and psychological, driven by terror. Hauff wrote satire, watching from the outside, using wit instead of dread. German Romanticism ran on both.
For the broader tradition of German Romantic fiction and its relationship to the occult and alchemical, see our companion essay.
The Devil Finds an Audience
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (Part One, 1808; Part Two, 1832) gave the Devil his most famous supporting role. Mephistopheles introduces himself to Faust as “part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.” The line captures the theological paradox that makes literary devils so compelling: evil serves a function in the cosmic order, and the agent of evil may understand that order better than the humans who benefit from it. For the historical figure behind the Faust legend, see The Real Dr. Faustus.
By the late nineteenth century, the Devil had gone mainstream.
Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895, Methuen) became one of the first modern bestsellers in the English language, selling approximately 25,000 copies in its first week. Her Satan, Prince Lucio Rimanez, is a weary, tragic aristocrat who longs for redemption but is condemned to corrupt every human he encounters. Corelli’s genius was making the Devil pitiable. Victorian readers, caught between Darwin and the spiritualist revival, wanted a Devil who suffered.
Frederic Soulie had explored similar territory in Les Memoires du diable (The Devil’s Memoirs, 1837-38), a massive French serial novel in which Satan narrates tales of Parisian corruption and betrayal. The novel was hugely popular in its time but is largely forgotten today, another casualty of the 19th-century tradition of publishing in installments, which produced enormous works that later generations lacked the patience to read. It deserves rediscovery.
Ambrose Bierce took a different approach. His The Cynic’s Word Book (1906), expanded and republished as The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911, is not a novel but a lexicon of definitions written from a diabolical perspective. “Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.” Bierce did not need a plot. He needed a vantage point. The Devil’s gave him permission to define every human institution as a sham, and readers loved it because the definitions were too precise to argue with.
Anatole France won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, in part for La Revolte des anges (The Revolt of the Angels, 1914), a novel in which guardian angels in Paris organize a rebellion against God. It is a gentler, more philosophical take on the Miltonic revolt: what if the angels rebelled not from pride but from genuine moral objection? France’s angels conclude that even if they won, the victor would become the new tyrant. It is the most politically sophisticated devil-novel of the early twentieth century.
Soviet Satan, Christian Satan
The twentieth century produced two masterpieces of devil-narration, from opposite ends of the theological spectrum.
Mikhail Bulgakov began writing The Master and Margarita in 1928. He worked on it for twelve years, revising obsessively. He knew it could never be published in Stalin’s Soviet Union. He died in 1940 with the manuscript unfinished. His widow, Yelena, preserved it. Twenty-six years later, in 1966-67, a heavily censored version appeared in the magazine Moskva. The full text was not published until 1973.
The novel’s premise is simple. Woland, the Devil, arrives in Moscow with a retinue of demons, including a giant gun-toting cat named Behemoth, and proceeds to expose the greed, cowardice, and spiritual emptiness of Soviet society through supernatural pranks. Officials are humiliated. Apartments catch fire. A head is torn from a body during a stage performance. Money rains from the ceiling of a theater and turns into worthless paper.
Woland reveals more than he punishes. The people he encounters are frightened and compromised. The Devil is the only honest character in Moscow because he is the only one with nothing to fear from the state. Bulgakov used Satan’s immunity to say what no Soviet citizen could: that the system was built on cowardice, that everyone knew it, and that the pretense of belief was the real damnation.
C.S. Lewis published The Screwtape Letters in 1942, after serialization in the Church of England newspaper The Guardian the previous year. The format is a series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, advising his nephew Wormwood on the art of tempting a human soul. Lewis inverts every moral reference: God is “the Enemy,” virtue is “the danger,” and human love is a weapon to be feared.
Lewis proved that the Devil’s voice could serve orthodox Christian purposes. Screwtape’s advice is essentially a manual of self-deception: how humans talk themselves into small compromises that accumulate into spiritual death. The book’s lasting power comes from the uncomfortable recognition that Screwtape’s advice actually works. Most readers recognize Wormwood’s patient. The rationalizations Screwtape describes are familiar.
Bulgakov aimed the Devil at the state. Lewis aimed him at the individual conscience. The one narrator with nothing to lose turned out to be useful on both fronts.
The Devil on Screen
Two other works deserve mention before the Devil reaches the twenty-first century.
Mark Twain wrote Letters from the Earth between 1904 and 1909, a collection of satirical letters from Satan reporting on the absurdity of human civilization. Twain’s Satan is bewildered rather than malicious: humans invented heaven and then filled it with the one thing they find most boring (singing hymns) while excluding the one thing they enjoy most (sex). The work was so blasphemous by the standards of the time that Twain’s daughter blocked its publication until 1962.
Dostoevsky placed the Devil in Ivan Karamazov’s hallucination in The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Ivan’s Devil is a shabby, provincial gentleman, polite and faintly embarrassed, who torments Ivan with banality instead of temptation. He is the most unsettling Devil in literature because he has no grandeur. He is as disappointing as the universe itself.
In 1989, Neil Gaiman reimagined Lucifer in The Sandman comics as a bored, elegant ruler of Hell who decides he no longer wants the job. He hands the key to Hell to Dream and walks away. Mike Carey expanded the character into a solo Lucifer comic series (2000-2006), and the television adaptation (Fox 2016-2018, then Netflix 2019-2021) turned him into a charming nightclub owner in Los Angeles who helps the LAPD solve murders.
The Netflix version stripped away most of the theological complexity, but it sold. Satan as antihero works because the template Milton built, the rebel who loses the war but keeps his dignity, is the same character modern television cannot stop making: the loner who is smarter than everyone in the room.
For the broader Victorian Gothic tradition that made the Devil a staple of popular fiction, see Penny Dreadful: From Victorian Street Serials to Gothic Prestige TV.
Why Satan Keeps Talking
New devil-narrators appear every year. The format does not wear out because the mechanism underneath it is simple. Put the Devil on the page and he can say things no human character would survive saying. A person who calls civilization a fraud sounds bitter. The Devil sounds accurate.
He has no stake in the outcome. He has been watching for longer than any human institution has existed. His observations read like field notes from a visitor who finds the species interesting but does not belong to it.
Milton dressed him in tragedy. Hauff made him a comic tourist. By the time Bulgakov wrote him into Soviet Moscow, the Devil had learned compassion, and when Lewis got hold of him, he became a bureaucrat filing weekly reports on one human soul. The costume changes. The job description does not: stand outside and say what you see.
The reason the tradition survives is simpler than any literary analysis will make it sound. The Devil has nothing to protect, nothing to fear. Every other narrator has to calculate. The Devil just says what he sees.
Four centuries after Milton dictated those first lines to his daughter, the fallen angel is still talking. He has outlasted the theology that invented him and survived his own domestication into a Netflix charmer. The format lives because the need for it does. Someone has to say the thing out loud.
Recommended Reading
- Paradise Lost by John Milton — the poem that gave Satan his voice
