Marion L. Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949) is a vivid, forensic retelling of the 1692 hysteria that combines careful archival research with psychological insight. Working from court records and contemporary testimony, Starkey reconstructs how childhood imagination, social tensions, and religious fear coalesced into a community-wide panic, producing an atmosphere of “pity and terror” that she traces with both drama and scholarly restraint. The result is at once a gripping narrative and a measured attempt to explain how ordinary people came to commit extraordinary injustices—an accessible classic for readers of history, cultural psychology, and early America.
About the Author
Marion Lena Starkey (1901–1991) was an American historian and writer who trained at Boston University and Harvard and taught at institutions including Hampton Institute and the University of Connecticut before becoming a full-time author. Her research-driven narrative histories—of which The Devil in Massachusetts is the best known—draw on primary sources to combine readable storytelling with careful archival scholarship; Starkey’s work was influential for later dramatizations and studies of Salem.
