The Confidence Man: His Masquerade Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Confidence Man: His Masquerade Book

Long considered the author's strangest novel, The Confidence-Man is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-eighteenth-century America. A mysterious shape-changing Confidence-Man approaches passengers on a Mississippi steamboat and, winning over the (not quite innocent) victims with his charm, urges them to implicitly trust in the cosmos, in nature, and even in human nature-with predictable results.The Confidence-Man represented a departure for Melville, a satirical and socially acute work that was to be a further step away from his sea novels. Yet it confused and angered reviewers who preferred to pigeonhole him as an adventure writer. Some have argued the book was a joke on the readers loyal to his sea stories, but if so, it backfired. Dismissed by critics as unreadable, and an undoubted financial failure, The Confidence-Man's cold reception undermined Melville's belief in his ability to make a living writing works that were both popular and profound, and he soon gave up fiction. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that critics rediscovered the book and praised its wit, stunningly modern technique, and wry view that life may be just a cosmic con game.Read More

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  • Product Description

    A scathing, razor-sharp satire set on a New Orleans-bound riverboat, The Confidence-Man exposes the fraudulent optimism of so many American idols and idealists--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and P.T. Barnum, in particular--and draws a dark vision of a country being swallowed by its illusions of progress. It begins with a mute boarding a Mississippi boat and ends without a conclusion: "Something further may follow of this Masquerade." In between, the "confidence man," so well disguised as to avoid clear identification even by the reader, meets and tricks a boatful of unusual characters.


    The culmination of Herman Melville's brilliant career as a novelist, and the introduction of a particularly American brand of satire that is as caustic as it is funny, The Confidence-Man creates an elaborate and beautiful masquerade that asks: who in this world is worth our confidence?


    Why is Dalkey Archive doing yet-another edition of The Confidence-Man? And why is it doing Melville at all? First, this edition, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill over forty years ago, contains remarkable annotations by H. Bruce Franklin, intended for both the general reader and the scholar. It's an edition we have long admired. More importantly, we believe that The Confidence-Man is America's first "postmodern" novel--game-like, darkly comic, and completely inventive.

  • 1564784541
  • 9781564784544
  • Daniel Handler, H. Bruce Franklin
  • 1 January 2007
  • W. W. Norton & Co.
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 355
  • First Dalkey Archive
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