The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant features a devil who fixes the World Series. (Broadway’s Damn Yankees is based on this novel.) This seminar will not be reading that novel or play, but we will indeed become acquainted with at least six other devilish figures in literature – created by one Italian, two Englishmen, two Americans and one Russian. Will they strike us as scary? Hilarious? Intriguing? All of the above?

The works: Excerpts from Dante’s Inferno (1321) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (performed 1592); Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” (1936); Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins (1971); and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (written in the 1930s but published posthumously in 1967).