The Confidence Man (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Herman Melville
- First Published: 1857
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Satire
- Subjects: South or Southerners, Nineteenth century, Christianity, Good and evil, Rivers or waterways, Ethics, Amputation, amputees, or prosthetics, Fraud, Impostors or imposture, Steamboats
- Locales: Mississippi River
The action of Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade takes place on April Fool's Day aboard the Fidèle, a steamship heading down the Mississippi River. The novel introduces the reader to a bewildering array of characters, one of whom is a skilled confidence man who appears throughout the book in a variety of disguises.
The theme of The Confidence Man is trust—the limits of belief in society. Melville examines the heart of humankind and finds it as corrupt as Mark Twain did in his later works. Aboard the Fidèle, which is presented as a...
[The entire page is 968 words long]
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