Tom Walker and Walter Younger

Characters in stories often are similar and different and can be compared and contrasted with each other. In the short story The Devil and Tom Walker, the character of Tom Walker is both very similar and very different than a character in the play A Raisin In The Sun, Walter Younger. In the short story The Devil and Tom Walker takes place in New England, “About the year 1727, just at the time when earthquakes were prevalent in New England “(Tom Walker).” but in the play A Raisin in The Sun takes place in Chicago somewhere between World War II and the present.

Tom Walker from The Devil and Tom Walker and Walter Younger from A Raisin in the Sun are similar because they both take shortcuts in life when they could have taken the longer way and still have gotten there. When Tom Walker takes the shortcut he ends up at an old fort and “any one but he would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely melancholy place, for the common people had a bad opinion of it from the stories handed down from the time of the Indian wars (Tom Walker).” This is kind of like Walter Younger in A Raisin In The Sun because Walter tries to pay off an official so that he, Willy Harris and Bobo can get a liquor license so that they can open their liquor store that they want to open. Both Tom Walker and Walter Younger both learn that taking shortcuts in life is not always the best way to go. Walter Younger learns this lesson by giving all of the money that they inherited from the death of his money, including the money that was going for his sisters college and gave it to Willy Harris. Willy Harris was suppose to use the money that Walter gave him to bribe an official so that they could get a liquor license quicker and faster than usual and so that they could open up their liquor store fast. Willy Harris ended up running away