Melmoth the Wanderer

Melmoth the Wanderer is a Gothic novel by the Irish clergyman and playwright Charles Maturin, published in 1820.

Its central figure is a scholar who struck a bargain with the devil for a century and a half of extra life and who now wanders the world looking for somebody willing to take the pact over from him and release him from it. He appears to people at their worst moments, and the novel is built out of the accounts they give of meeting him: a prisoner in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, an exile on a remote island, a family trapped by debt and the law. Maturin tells these as stories inside stories, nested one within another, so that the reader comes at Melmoth's own history gradually and through other people's misfortunes.

The book was written under pressure from a publisher, and it draws on a great deal of reading in theology and in the literature of the supernatural. It went on to influence later writers who took up the idea of the wanderer who cannot die.