SOURCE: “‘Young Goodman Brown’: Hawthorne's ‘Devil in Manuscript,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 155-62.

In the following essay, Williamson studies multiple devil figures in Nathaniel Hawthorne's satirical tale “Young Goodman Brown.”

When Hawthorne commented on the vocation of authorship, he was often drawn to analogies between writing and damnation. “… authors,” he wrote with tongue-in-cheek in 1821, “are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them.”¹ The pun is on “devil,” which can mean a literary hack; and the meaning is clear: to write conventionally and without integrity is to damn oneself as a writer, even at the cost of popularity and recognition. “… America is now wholly given over to a d[amne]d mob of scribbling women,” Hawthorne wrote in 1855, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if...