Within these documents one can have a first hand account of what happened during the Salem Witch Trials.  The beginning of the trials all came about because of two girls; Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail Williams. Each of the girls were having unexplainable fits, where they would mutter chants under their breath, do things without remembering, and always claim to feel as though they were constantly being pricked with pins and needles, like being tortured from a voodoo doll. Since individuals were unable to find any physical signs of their problems, the cause was determined by several in the town to be witchcraft.  This claim opened the doors for accusations to start being thrown at anyone believed to be practicing witchcraft thereafter.
    The first woman accused of being a witch was Sarah Good, then two others followed, Sarah Osborne, and a black slave, Tituba.  They were all tried and found guilty without any real proof against them. Even though all three women were hung the trials and accusations did not stop after that.  Other cases of witchcraft in other counties of Massachusetts started to happen and more individuals were arrested and tried.
    By the end of the Salem Witch Trials fourteen women and five men were hung, one man was murdered by villagers, four died in jail awaiting their trial and verdict, and over two hundred other people were arrested because of the accusations of them practicing witchcraft.

With this book author John Putnam Demos revisits and recounts witchcraft like many others, but what stands out about his version is that he looks at not only the years of 1692-1693 that deal with just the Salem Witch Trials, but the years leading up to them and after them.  By focusing on both pre and post accounts of the trials, Demos is able to give other examples that are rarely given in other books or novels.
    One is able to also get an early account of pastor Cotton Mather as he is summoned in late 1688, to the home of a man named John Goodwin who's children were being tortured by witchcraft.  By the end of his experience Mather is able to author a book under the title Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, using the Goodwin children as main characters.  With this one can begin to understand Mather's influence on witchcraft in literature and how he was able to shape the stories he was involved with.   
    Demos' book is also useful to show witchcraft within literature because of how he breaks apart his novel into four sections.  The sections tell of witchcraft by first, making the "witches" themselves central figures.  Then, he focuses on the victims and accusers of the witches.  Third, Demos relates witchcraft to the shaping and structure of communities around early New England.  Finally, he focuses on the history and how everything changes as witchcraft takes on a life of its own even up until today.

This book by author Bernard Rosenthal takes a look at all of the witch trials that are written about in The Salem Witchcraft Papers and breaks them down in order to get a clear understanding behind each one.  Each chapter is a new trial and is put in chronological order to build the events surrounding each one on top of the other.  Also, each trial is broken down and looks at the accusation of the individual and one or more of the key individuals involved with it.  Rosenthal constructs plausible versions of each event and tries to reject all ideas of "hysteria" on the part of all of the accusers.  What is different about this book compared to others is that instead of just offering a story about the trials or giving facts Rosenthal states his side on more than one occasion, in which he believes in systematic fraud by all of the members of the court in order to gain financially from the trials.  Because of Rosenthal's view on the trials this may leave some feeling as if it is incomplete or too bias.

One is able to get a true sense of the impact of the Salem Witch Trials and the word "witchcraft" in general.  This is a list of important authors who have created pieces of work linked together to span several years which create what we now know of witchcraft and demonic ideas in fiction today.   
    Some of the author's and works written of are: Johnathan Scott's The Sorceress (1817), Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), James McHenry's The Spectre of the Forest (1820), and Robert Calef's More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700), just to name a few.
    Once Longfellow's and Hawthorne's works become part of the subject of "witchcraft" it is said that the witchcraft theme transformed into a romantic theme of love, lust, and uncertainty that went hand and hand together for readers of a romantic novel.  It is believed that there needed to be a colorful subject for historical romance, thus heightening the interest within the Witch Invasion of New England at that time and even through today.

A piece of literature that reflects the theme of Mather's and Calef's arguments and that of the Salem Witch Trials is Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story Young Goodman Brown. 
    It is believed Hawthorne wrote the story in guilt of the fact that his great-great grandfather John Hathorne played an intricate role as judge during the trials.  This is also the main reason for Hawthorne adding the "w" within his last name, so he is not to be linked to him.
    This short story is an allegory about the discovery of the devil and the true nature of finding humanity.  One reads of Young Goodman Brown during the story literally "taking a walk with the devil," which causes him to learn many lessons about those surrounding him.  It is this walk that also causes him much sorrow as he feels he was able to envision the true nature of each person he knew.  This made him a cynical man, wary of everyone until his final days.

One of the most important pieces of literature that has come out of the Salem Witch Trials is Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a drama written in 1953, close to two hundred and sixty years after the occurrences in Salem. Miller's play follows the events of the trials and keeps names the same, but is still mostly "inspired" by them and not all actions of the characters being true.  Miller did not look to tell the story with great historical accuracy, for he changed a great deal of the events and the people involved in order to make them fit the plot.
    The main motivation behind why Miller decided to write The Crucible was for a commentary for the anti-communist proceedings of the government. During the time of him writing in the 1950's, the Cold War with the Soviet Union was a threat in American minds, and the United States government was blacklisting people for being accused Communists.
    Miller spent a week in Salem, learning of the history of the town and the trials and he found that there were striking parallels to the modern-day McCarthy trials that the government selected to do. He found that the more he read into the mass hysteria and panic of the Salem trials, the more it reminded him of what was happening.