The Devil and Tom Walker: Summary & Analysis

Washington Irving American folklore Short story

Published 11 September 2026 · Updated 11 September 2026

Summary of The Devil and Tom Walker

"The Devil and Tom Walker" is a short story by Washington Irving, first published in 1824 in Tales of a Traveller. Set in colonial Massachusetts near Boston, it tells the story of a miserly man who strikes a bargain with the devil — known here as "Old Scratch" — exchanging his soul for buried pirate treasure. Tom Walker accepts the deal and becomes a wealthy moneylender, growing rich by charging extortionate interest to desperate borrowers. As he grows old and fears damnation, he becomes a hypocritical religious convert, attending church and carrying his Bible, while continuing his predatory lending. One day the devil comes to collect, and Tom is carried off into the swamp on a black horse, never to return. A moral fable in the tradition of Faust, the story is also a sharp critique of Puritan hypocrisy and American greed.

Plot summary

"The Devil and Tom Walker" (1824) is a Faustian tale grounded in specific American colonial geography and moral satire, presented in Irving's characteristically dry, comic voice.

Beginning

Irving sets the story in colonial Massachusetts, 1727, near a dark, swampy forest outside Boston. Tom Walker and his wife are a perfectly miserable match: both equally miserly, they spend their lives fighting over every penny. The swamp nearby is said to contain treasure buried by the pirate Captain Kidd, but the devil — Old Scratch — guards it. One day Tom takes a shortcut through the swamp and encounters a large, dark figure sitting on a tree stump, hatchet in hand. The stumps around him have names carved into them: the names of prominent men in the community.

Rising action

Old Scratch tells Tom the treasure can be his on certain conditions. Tom is interested but not desperate enough to agree immediately. He goes home and tells his wife, who urges him to take the bargain at once. She is so eager that she goes to negotiate with the devil herself — and disappears. Tom finds only her apron in the swamp, with her heart and liver inside it. He is more amused than grieved. He returns to the devil and this time accepts the deal, but refuses the condition of using the treasure to fund the slave trade. Instead he becomes a money-broker — a usurer — lending at ruinous rates to merchants, ship captains, and landowners in financial distress.

Climax

Tom grows wealthy and builds a grand house, but leaves much of it unfinished — the ostentation of wealth without the willingness to pay for it fully. As he ages, fear of damnation grows. He becomes loudly and publicly religious: he attends church constantly, carries his Bible everywhere, and speaks the language of piety fluently. He continues lending at usurious rates throughout. One afternoon, he is in his counting-house threatening to ruin a land speculator when he says — as he has said often — "the devil take me if I have made a farthing." A knock comes at the door. A black figure on horseback is waiting.

Ending

Tom barely has time to reach for his Bible before he is swept onto the horse and carried at full gallop toward the swamp. He is seen no more. His grand house catches fire and burns to the ground; inside it, his strongboxes are found to contain nothing but wood shavings and chips. His horses are found dead in the stable, their bones showing through their hides. Everything Tom acquired through his bargain disappears with him. The neighbors moralize on his fate for some time, then return to their own affairs.

Characters & setting

Irving populates the story with recognizable types — the miser, the shrewish wife, the devil in American disguise — and grounds them in a specific historical landscape.

Tom Walker

Tom is miserly, cold-blooded, and entirely without sentiment — the perfect candidate for a Faustian bargain because he already treats every relationship as a transaction. His refusal to fund the slave trade reads less as moral scruple than as preference for a different kind of predation. He is not evil in a dramatic sense; he is simply a man who has reduced all value to money. His late-life religious conversion is the story's sharpest satirical point: the man who spent his life extracting wealth from the desperate now performs piety while continuing the same behavior. Irving makes no distinction between the hypocrite and the sinner.

Mrs. Walker

Mrs. Walker is Tom's equal in avarice and his superior in initiative — she goes to the devil before Tom does. Her disappearance (she is apparently taken by the devil in a negotiation gone wrong) is presented as darkly comic, and Tom's mild satisfaction at the news is one of Irving's wittiest strokes. She exists mainly to establish that Tom's greed is not unusual — it is the shared condition of their marriage.

Old Scratch

The devil in Irving's story is distinctly American: not the aristocratic Mephistopheles of European tradition but a swarthy woodsman with a hatchet, keeping accounts of prominent citizens' sins by carving their names in tree stumps. He is businesslike, not theatrical. The names on the stumps belong to real types — deacons, politicians, wealthy merchants — which makes the satire specific. Compare the more Gothic supernatural encounter in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the folk mythology of Rip Van Winkle.

The swamp

The dark swamp outside Boston is Irving's American equivalent of the Gothic forest — a place outside civilization where the normal rules do not apply. It contains buried treasure, it swallowed Tom's wife, and it is where the devil waits. It is also a historically resonant space: the forest and the swamp were, in Puritan thinking, places of spiritual danger, the domain of the devil and the indigenous peoples the colonists displaced. Irving uses this geography knowingly.

Themes, symbols & analysis

"The Devil and Tom Walker" is, among other things, one of the earliest and sharpest critiques of American capitalism in the country's literary tradition.

The Faustian bargain in an American context

Irving adapts the European Faust legend — sell your soul for worldly success — to the specific conditions of colonial New England. Tom's bargain is not for knowledge (Marlowe's Faustus) or experience (Goethe's Faust) but for money, pure and simple. The American version of the legend strips away the Romantic aspiration and replaces it with naked greed. This makes Irving's moral cleaner and harsher: there is nothing admirable in Tom's ambition. He wants money because he wants money.

Hypocrisy and Puritan culture

Irving aims his satire at the specifically Puritan form of hypocrisy: the public performance of righteousness that coexists with private predation. Tom attends church zealously; he is also a usurer who destroys families. The two behaviors are not in tension for him — the church-going is a kind of insurance policy, which is itself a financial metaphor. The story implies that Puritan New England's moral language was always already compatible with this kind of double-dealing.

Greed and its American form

The story's targets are recognizably American: the money-broker, the speculator, the man who builds a grand house and leaves it half-finished. Irving published the story in 1824, when American commercial culture was expanding rapidly and the moral language of Protestant virtue was being used to justify accumulation. Tom Walker is an early American capitalist rendered as a devil's agent, which suggests that the two roles are not far apart.

The devil's bookkeeping

Old Scratch's habit of carving prominent men's names in tree stumps is the story's most original image: the devil as accountant, tracking debts. The stumps bear the names of a deacon, a lawyer, a governor — not criminals but pillars of the community. Irving's implication is that the community's most respectable figures are all in the devil's ledger, whether they have formally signed or not.

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