The Confidence-Man
by Herman Melville
Long considered Melville's strangest novel, The Man of Trust is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-nineteenth-century America. A self-confident man who changes shape, brings passengers closer to the steamer of the Mississippi River, and wins his victims, who are not entirely innocent by his charm, urges everyone to trust in the cosmos, nature and even human nature – with predictable results. In Melville's day, the book was such a failure that it abandoned fiction for twenty years; but in the twentieth century critics noted his technical virtuosity, intelligence, far-reaching social vision, and audacious skepticism.
