The Confidence-Man

The Confidence-Man (1857) is a novel by American writer Herman Melville. After the failure of his novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville struggled to find a publisher who would accept his work. When it was published, The Confidence-Man was seen as a flawed, unnecessarily complicated novel, and beyond several collections of poetry, it all but ended Melville’s career as a professional writer. When Melville’s work was reappraised in the 1920s, however, scholar...