The Confidence-Man

Herman Melville

oct 2016 · Open Road Media

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From the author of Moby Dick: A con artist swindles his fellow passengers on a Mississippi River steamboat in this exploration of human nature.

A mysterious stranger boards a steamboat bound for New Orleans on April Fools’ Day. But just who is this confidence-man?
 
At first, he is a mute, clad in cream-colored clothes and a white fur hat, boarding the steamer Fidèle in St. Louis. The man transforms when he meets a group of passengers. He assumes the identities of a crippled beggar named “Black Guinea,” an agent from the Seminole Widow and Orphan Society, and the president of the Black Rapids Coal Company, among other disguises. As the ship makes its way to its final destination and the huckster’s deceptions lead to thefts, everyone on board will be left wondering whom they can trust.
 
A cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, The Confidence-Man is one of the most unconventional works by the legendary author of Moby Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor.

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Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York City and worked as a bank clerk and a schoolteacher before joining the crew of the whaler Acushnet on its voyage from Massachusetts to the South Pacific. Melville jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, an experience memorably recounted in his bestselling autobiographical novel Typee. Much of his later work, including Moby-Dick and the classic novellas Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, was not well received during his lifetime, but Melville is now considered one of the nineteenth century’s most innovative and important authors.