The Confidence Man
Research papers on The Confidence Man by Herman Melville explicate the American novel for students to use as a guide in understanding the book. Get yours today, custom written.
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade is the final novel of, American writer, Herman Melville, which is his ninth novel and tenth book published in eleven years. The book was published on April 1, 1857, and is set on the same day (April Fools' Day).
The structure of the novel has been compared to the Canterbury Tales, in which a series of connected stories are told about a group of travelers, in this case travelers aboard a steamboat heading down the Mississippi River towards New Orleans. The title is taken from the character who sneaks aboard the ship on April Fools' Day. The various stories are the reactions of other passengers to this man's attempts to test their confidence.
The Confidence Man
The Confidence-Man is all of the following types of literature:
The Mississippi River becomes a symbol of various aspects of American society, a technique Melville employed in Moby-Dick, where the Pequod served that role.
This novel was very poorly received by the critics and the buying public upon publication, and Melville largely abandoned writing fiction afterwards, turning his attention to poetry. His only other work of prose after this was Billy Budd, Sailor, which Melville began writing in 1885, but was left unfinished at the author's death in 1891. Billy Budd was not published until 1924.