The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving
Quick answer: The Devil and Tom Walker by Irving: full summary with the ending, Old Scratch's bargain, the usurer carried off, themes of greed, and the story's craft.
A miser takes a shortcut through a Massachusetts swamp and meets a soot-faced woodsman sitting on a skull, who offers him Captain Kidd's buried treasure at the usual price. The Devil and Tom Walker appeared in 1824 in Irving's Tales of a Traveller, and it is the great American telling of the Faust bargain, relocated to New England and stripped of every scrap of grandeur: no scholar's thirst for knowledge here, just money.
The story earned its place on school syllabuses by being wicked fun with a visible moral, and its place in literary history by domesticating European legend into American satire. Students want the summary and the symbols; writers should watch how Irving keeps a damnation tale trotting at the pace of a joke, and where he hides the knife.
The story in brief
Near Boston, around 1727, lives Tom Walker, a miser so mean that he and his equally miserly wife hide possessions from each other and starve the horse they share. Crossing an inland swamp one evening, Tom rests at an old Indian fort and meets a great black man, neither slave nor labourer, begrimed with soot, hewing trees marked with the names of the colony's prominent men. He introduces himself by his works, presiding, he says, over persecutions and slave dealing, and Tom recognises Old Scratch. The devil offers Kidd's pirate treasure, buried under his protection, on certain conditions. Tom, uncharacteristically, hesitates, mostly to spite his wife; when she learns of it, she resolves to strike the bargain herself, and disappears into the swamp with the household silver bundled in her apron. Tom, searching less for her than for the valuables, finds at last only the apron hanging in a tree with a heart and a liver inside it, and signs of a fierce fight. He mourns the property, feels something like gratitude toward the devil, and negotiates his own terms.
Old Scratch presses him to invest the treasure in the slave trade; even Tom refuses that, and they settle on usury. Set up in Boston as a moneylender in a time of speculation and bad paper, Tom grinds the desperate mercilessly and grows rich, building a showy, half-furnished house. In old age, worried at last about the fine print, he turns violently religious: loud prayers, censorious zeal, a big Bible on the counting desk and a small one always in his coat pocket. It avails nothing. One hot afternoon, foreclosing on a ruined land-jobber who begs for mercy, Tom snaps that the devil may take him if he has made a farthing on the man. Three knocks sound; a black figure with a black horse waits at the door, and Tom, his pocket Bible buried under the mortgage he was foreclosing, is swept onto the saddle and galloped away in a thunderstorm, down toward the swamp, never to return. Trustees find his bonds and deeds reduced to cinders, his gold turned to chips and shavings, his horses gone to skeletons, and his house soon burns. The tale ends as folklore: his troubled spirit is said to haunt the fort in the swamp, and the New England proverb about the devil and Tom Walker survives him.
The characters and what they want
Tom Walker wants money and, almost as dearly, victory over his wife; Irving's blackest joke is that spite, not conscience, delays the bargain. His wife wants the same treasure and dies trying to cut Tom out of the deal, in the story's most cheerfully brutal episode. Old Scratch wants souls and behaves throughout like an experienced local businessman, patient, contract-minded, holding excellent collateral; his dry professionalism is the engine of the comedy. The Boston crowd of speculators, dreamers and the desperate wants easy credit, and their folly feeds Tom exactly as Tom feeds the devil, which is the satire's tidy food chain.
Themes and meaning
Exam essentials: greed is the announced target, with the Faustian bargain as its instrument, and hypocrisy is the second, skewered in Tom's late-life religiosity, the loud piety of a man scanning his contract for loopholes. Irving's swamp trees, each grand trunk rotten at the core and marked with a prominent name, supply the symbol students should always cite: public success, private corruption, ready for felling. The story also carries a specific economic satire, aimed at speculation manias and predatory lending, that reads uncomfortably well in any century.
The sharper observation: Irving allows even his devil a standard, and Tom one refusal. Old Scratch proposes the slave trade; Tom declines, and the narrator notes the devil himself could not tempt him into it, then sets him up as a usurer instead. The line is doing double work, damning slavery as a trade beneath even the damned, and pricing usury as its nearest neighbour. Readers who catch that adjacency have found the moral centre of what pretends to be a mere comic legend.
The craft: how the story works
Irving narrates damnation in the tone of town gossip, and that tonal choice is the masterclass: the horrors, a wife reduced to an apron of organs, a man galloped into a burning swamp, arrive with a shrug and an as-the-old-folks-say, which keeps the comedy airborne and makes the darkness land late, on reflection. The structure is a clean ledger: every gain is a loan, and the story is simply the schedule of repayments, with Tom's own oath, the devil may take him, serving as the signature that closes the account. Irving also perfects the offstage atrocity; the wife's fate is delivered as inventory, an apron, a heart, a liver, and the withheld scene is worse than any written one.
The technique worth stealing is the self-executing curse. Give your protagonist a habitual, insincere oath early, let the reader forget it, then have him utter it once, in earnest circumstances, where it can be collected. Endings that the character himself has spoken aloud feel like justice, not authorial intervention, and the difference is everything in a moral tale.
Kidd's gold and American Faust
Irving hangs the tale on the enduring legend of Captain Kidd's buried treasure, guarded, as the story has it, by the devil, who presided over its hiding as he does over all buried wealth. That graft of pirate lore onto the Faust bargain produced something genuinely new: a European damnation story retold as Yankee anecdote, with the devil as a shrewd man of business and hell entered through a real-estate foreclosure. Hawthorne's dark New England parables and a long line of American deal-with-the-devil stories, up through the courtroom fantasy of Stephen Vincent Benet a century later, descend directly from this swamp.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, cite the marked trees, sound bark and rotten cores bearing great men's names, as the story's central symbol.
- Pair greed with hypocrisy: Tom's two Bibles are the image that carries the second theme.
- Remember the one refusal, the slave trade, and what its placement says about how Irving ranks usury.
- Writers: deliver your worst horrors as offhand inventory; the apron with the heart and liver is the model.
- Steal the self-executing curse, an oath planted as habit and collected, once, in earnest.
- Keep a damnation tale at gossip speed; the shrugging narrator is what makes the darkness digestible and durable.
Try it yourself
Write a deal-with-the-devil story set in your own town's most ordinary industry, with a tempter who behaves like a patient local professional. Give your protagonist one line they say carelessly all their life, and end the story the single time they say it and mean it.
Questions
What happens at the end of The Devil and Tom Walker?
Foreclosing on a ruined speculator, Tom swears the devil may take him if he has made a farthing on the man. Old Scratch appears at the door with a black horse, carries Tom off in a thunderstorm toward the swamp, and he is never seen again. His wealth turns to cinders and shavings, and his house burns.
What do the trees in the swamp symbolise?
Each tree is fair outside and rotten at the core, marked with the name of a prominent colonist and ready for the devil's axe. They symbolise successful men whose public virtue conceals corruption, with damnation as the felling.
Why does Tom Walker refuse the slave trade?
Irving says even the devil could not tempt Tom into it, a line that damns slave trading as beneath the story's worst characters. Tom bargains instead to become a usurer, which the tale places only one step above, sharpening its satire on predatory lending.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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