Confidence Man (Literary Classics)

by Herman Melville

Overview

Poorly received when first published in 1857, The Confidence Man is now considered Herman Melville's "most nearly perfect work," and one that occupies a central place in the American literary tradition of masquerade and trickery.

Set on April Fool's Day aboard a Mississippi steamer, this powerful and engaging novel, through the conversations of the confidence man (who may be looked on as the Devil or God), explores America and American values.

Part satire, part hoax, The Confidence Man is also a dark look at the nothingness lurking beneath our beliefs and assumptionsa look at a universe in which neither God nor the Devil exists, and where Christianity is only a comforting fiction little better than an April Fool's prank.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616140946
Publisher:	Prometheus Books
Publication date:	09/01/1995
Series:	Literary Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	637 KB

About the Author

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Date of Birth:

August 1, 1819

Date of Death:

September 28, 1891

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended the Albany Academy in Albany, New York, until age 15