Editor’s Note: The Autobiography of Satan (Authorized Edition) by William A. Glasser is available here.

Do you want to be one of this world’s damn fools, swallowing everything spoon‑fed to you, or do you want to start thinking for yourself?

Why, you ask, with your usual suspicions, should you pay attention to anything I say? It’s a reasonable question.  Why, indeed?  Your distorted sense of me has persisted for much too long now, and to your own detriment, I might add, for it has been used incessantly to scare you into an unquestioning state of submission. There have been far too many twisted accounts of me, both mythic and legendary—and all, of course, unauthorized. Deep inside the mental pockets of your memory, generally out of sight and mind, you carry around these delusional tales like small, polished, talismanic stones that have the power, if the need ever arises, to ward off any approach I might make toward you.  But all they have accomplished thus far is to keep you unaware of what is lurking beneath them, the insidious web of secrets that, across the ages, has so cleverly been kept hidden from you. My aim, as you will see now, if you can only look with open eyes, is to awaken you to the truth of my existence.  Believe me when I say that my deepest desire has always been to tell you the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me—even though, for thousands of  years, I have been branded the Father of Lies. Talk about a bum rap.

Picture a hairy, red‑faced character, with horns, claws, and a pointed tail, a sulphur‑smelling, demonic figure, wearing a hideous grin as he pitchforks soul after salacious soul into the burning depths of Hell. Can you imagine any reasonable individual swallowing such a silly explanation for why evil exists in this world? But I am obviously getting ahead of myself. This is, after all, the story of my life.