All Formats & Editions

The Second Edition features significantly expanded explanatory annotations, particularly of biblical allusions.

"Contemporary Reviews" includes nineteen commentaries on The Confidence-Man, eight of them new to the Second Edition. Better understood today are the concerted... Read Full Overview

Onboard the Fid le, a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous guises - from a legless beggar and a worldly businessman to a collector for charitable causes and... Read Full Overview

"In The Confidence-Man ," writes John Bryant in his Introduction, "Melville found a way to render our tragic sense of self and society through the comic strategies of the confidence game. He puts the reader in the game to play its parts and to contemplate the inconsistencies... Read Full Overview

The Confidence-Man (1857) is a novel by American writer Herman Melville. After the failure of his novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville struggled to find a publisher who would accept his work. When it was published, The Confidence-Man... Read Full Overview

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the 'masquerade' of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fid?le is 'the confidence man'? The central motif of Melville's last and most 'modern' novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history. No other... Read Full Overview

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the masquerade of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fidele is the confidence man? The central motif of Melville's last and most modern novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history.

A scathing, razor-sharp satire set on a New Orleans-bound riverboat, The Confidence-Man exposes the fraudulent optimism of so many American idols and idealists--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and P. T. Barnum, in particular--and draws a dark vision of a country being... Read Full Overview

How is this book unique? Font adjustments & biography included Unabridged (100% Original content) Illustrated About The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade is the ninth book and final novel by American writer Herman Melville. The Confidence-Man... Read Full Overview

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the masquerade' of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fid le is the confidence man'? The central motif of Melville's last and most modern' novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history.