The Confidence-Man
His Masquerade
A Canterbury Tales for pre-Civil War America.
On April Fool’s Day the titular Confidence-Man stows away aboard a steamboat, where he tests the motley group of passengers, forcing them to wrestle with their own confidence and where they place their trust. Melville weaves their stories together into an amazing satirical tapestry that crosses genres and styles. It was his final novel, and one of his most challenging.
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July 25, 2017Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. When his father died, he was forced to leave school and find work. After passing through some minor clerical jobs, the eighteen-year-old young man shipped out to sea, first on a short cargo trip, then, at twenty-one, on a three-year South Sea whaling venture. From the experiences accumulated on this voyage would come the material for his early books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), as well as for such masterpieces as Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856), and Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories (posthumous, 1924). Though the first two novels—popular romantic adventures—sold well, Melville's more serious writing failed to attract a large audience, perhaps because it attacked the current philosophy of transcendentalism and its espoused "self-reliance." (As he…