The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

Herman Melville

Jun 2016 · Blackstone Audio Inc. · Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki

About this audiobook

In his ninth and final novel, cultural observer, novelist, and poet Herman Melville gives us a picture of everything wrong with America in the decade preceding the Civil War.Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. Aboard the Fidele can be found all manner of con man, from those selling stock in failing companies and herbal cure-all "medicines" to those who are raising money for a supposed charitable organization and those who simply ask for money outright. One man sneaks aboard ship to test the so-called confidence of the passengers, and everyone is forced to confront that in which he places his trust before journey's end. Mixing his trademark satirical style with allegory and metaphysical treatise, Melville's The Confidence-Man is a precursor to the twentieth-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.

About the author

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York. Family hardships forced him to leave school for various occupations, including shipping as a cabin boy to Liverpool in 1839—a voyage that sparked his love for the sea. A shrewd social critic and philosopher in his fiction, he is considered an outstanding writer of the sea and a great stylist who mastered both realistic narrative and a rich, rhythmical prose.

Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than three thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices in 2012.