Ed Simon: On Writing the History Book He Wanted To Read

Ed Simon is the executive director of Belt Media Collaborative and editor in chief of Belt Magazine. A staff writer for the Millions, his essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, the New Republic, and the Washington Post. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his family. Follow him on X (Twitter) and Facebook.

Ed Simon

Photo by by Meg Finan

In this interview, Ed discusses the 20-year process of idea to publication for his new historical nonfiction book, Devil’s Contract, how scholarly writing differs from that of trade publication, and more!

Name: Ed Simon
Literary agent: Jake Lovell of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
Book title: Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain
Publisher: Melville House
Release date: July 9, 2024
Genre/category: Nonfiction/History/Cultural Studies/Religion/Philosophy
Previous titles: Paradise Lost: A 350th Anniversary Edition; Seven Sins and Seven Virtues; The Soul of Pittsburgh: Essays on Life, Community and History; Elysium: An Illustrated History of Angelology; Relic; Heaven, Hell, and Paradise Lost; Binding the Ghost: Theology, Mystery, and the Transcendence of Literature; Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology; The God Beat: What Journalism Says About Faith and Why it Matters; An Alternative History of Pittsburgh; Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance’s Radicalism; The Anthology of Babel; Furnace of this World; or, 36 Observations about Goodness; America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion
Elevator pitch: The first full, comprehensive, and popular history of the infamous Faustian legend.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

What prompted you to write this book?

This is a book that I’ve wanted to write for an incredibly long time. My beat, largely, is things that are related to religion and faith, but my disposition is such that I’ve always been drawn to the more extreme facets of belief. I’ve written about demons, I’ve written about relics, and so a book about Faust is something that fits right in with what my interests are. That’s the general explanation, when it comes to Faust in particular, I think that the legend about someone who sells their soul to the Devil for certain powers or knowledge is obviously evocative. What really shocked me is that there hasn’t before been a popular cultural history of the legend, in all of its permutations, though obviously there have been, by the shelfful, fantastic scholarly works on particular aspects of the myth. Toni Morrison once said that you should write the book that you want to read, and I’ll confess that I’ve always wanted there to be a history of the Faust legend—so I wrote one.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

From the very beginnings of wanting to write this book until its actual publication was a really long time, far longer than most of my ideas—almost 20 years. I first knew that I wanted to write this book when I began my graduate studies in English two decades ago, and originally I thought that maybe my dissertation could be a general history of the Faust legend, of the narrative whereby somebody sells their soul to the Devil, from the Bible all the way to the modern day. Quickly I learned that in graduate school, and scholarly writing more generally, you tend not to be given such latitude to widely range in that way.

But in the back of my mind, I knew that this was a title I wanted to write, and at various points, such as when I was able to visit Christopher Marlowe’s grave in 2013, that desire to return to this subject would emerge again. I began querying folks in earnest around 2019, but lots of folks passed over the proposal, which was obviously frustrating but also surprising to me. When I signed with Melville House—fully cognoscente of the appropriateness of signing a contract to write about the Devil’s contract!—I found a house and an editor who were incredibly supportive and really understood what I was trying to do. After that the book was written really quickly, about nine months. Whether that’s because of supernatural affinities or because the idea had been germinating in my mind for so long, I leave to the readers to parse.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I think that the most useful thing I learned during this process, and every writer learns something from a good editor (and my editor Mike Lindgren was definitely that), was how to smooth down some of the scholarly affectations that naturally come in from my entire adult life being in the university. In graduate school we’re trained to do what’s known as a “literature review,” this kind of recap of everything in your field, which can be dry as hell, and also to heavily rely on endless secondary quotations. There are reasons for that in the scholarly world, but it doesn’t translate well to a trade publication, and I think that even when we assume we’re not doing it, we’re doing it. Learning how to rely more on my own voice without a million quotations was a really valuable skill to refine.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Going into this project, I knew that there were going to be a number of versions of the Faustian legend that I’d write about, from Renaissance magicians to the bluesman Robert Johnson, but I was surprised by just how often I kept on seeing Dr. Faust pop up all over the place.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

That they have the opportunity to learn about what I think is a tremendously interesting subject, that they apply it to important issues of today, and that they do this by enjoying language and narrative that I hope they find to be written with verve and style.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

That it’s always better to write without thinking than to think without writing. Afterwards, editing and revision exist for a reason.

With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!