The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, 1592, Together with the Second Report of Faustus, Containing His Appearances and the Deeds of Wagner, 1594.

Here is the original nightmare: a German chapbook from 1592, the first printed account of the man who sold his soul. Doctor John Faustus, a learned scholar dissatisfied with the limits of human knowledge, makes a pact with Mephistopheles, trading twenty-four years of supernatural power for his eternal soul. He travels with demons, learns forbidden arts, raises Helen of Troy as his concubine, and terrorizes the German countryside before the devil claims what was always promised. This is not the sophisticated tragedy of later adaptations. It is a crude, sensationalist Protestant pamphlet, written to frighten and moralize, to show what happens when ambition exceeds divine permission. The prose is rough, the theology is fierce, and the ending is uncompromising: Faustus is torn apart by demons, his soul dragged to hell, his body left for dogs. It is the ur-text of one of literature's most enduring myths, the raw folk material that Marlowe and Goethe would later transform into tragedy and philosophy.