Aboard a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day, a shape-shifting swindler works through a series of disguises to test the credulity and charity of his fellow passengers, in Melville's bleak, riddling satire on trust and belief.
Books mentioned in The Confidence-Man (2)
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: “But they can hardly be original in the sense that Hamlet is, or Don Quixote, or Milton's Satan.”
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: “would that be the fair thing in Asmodeus? Or, as Hamlet says, were it 'to consider the thing too curiously?'”
Books that mention The Confidence-Man (1)
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams: Epigraph before Part One: "The Confidence Man, Herman Melville" attributed alongside the Emerson epigraph.