The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was the last major novel by Herman Melville, the American writer and author of Moby-Dick. Published on April 1, 1857 (presumably the exact day of the novel's setting), The Confidence-Man was Melville's tenth major work in eleven years. The novel portrays a Canterbury Tales-style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel up the Mississippi River. After the novel's publication, Melville turned from professional writing and became a professional lecturer, mainly addressing his worldwide travels. He continued to write poetry, but published no major prose work after The Confidence-Man. Herman Melville Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, essayist, and poet. ... The term writer can apply to anyone who creates a written work, but the word more usually designates those who write creatively or professionally, or those who have written in many different forms. ... The word author has several meanings: The author of a book, story, article or the like, is the person who has written it (or is writing it). ... Moby-Dick book cover Moby-Dick - the official title of the first edition - is a novel by Herman Melville. ... April 1 is the 91st day of the year (92nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 274 days remaining. ... 1857 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... Canterbury Tales Woodcut 1484 The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century (two of them in prose, the rest in verse). ... Paddle steamers - Lucerne-Switzerland Left: original paddlewheel from a paddle steamer on the lake of Lucerne. ... Length 6,270 km Elevation of the source 450 m Average discharge Saint Louis¹: 5,500 m³/s Vicksburg²: 16,800 m³/s Baton Rouge³: 12,800 m³/s Area watershed 2,980,000 km² Origin  Lake Itasca Mouth  Gulf of Mexico Basin countries United States (98. ... Lecturer is the name given to university teachers in most of the English-speaking world (but not at most universities in the US or Canada) who do not hold a professorship. ...

The novel's title refers to its central character, an ambiguous figure (most likely a spiritual entity, not clearly benevolent or malevolent, and certainly not as identifiable as the Devil in Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger) who sneaks aboard a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day. This stranger attempts to test the confidence of the passengers, whose varied reactions constitute the bulk of the text. Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a famous and popular American humorist, writer and lecturer. ... The Mysterious Stranger is an unfinished work written by the American author Mark Twain that was worked on periodically from roughly 1890 up until his death in 1910. ... April Fools Day or All Fools Day, though not a holiday in its own right, is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1. ...

Like Twain's Huckleberry Finn, The Confidence-Man uses the Mississippi River as a metaphor for those broader aspects of American and human identity that unify the otherwise disparate characters. Melville also employs the river's fluidity as a reflection and backdrop of the shifting identities of his "confidence man." Huckleberry Finn is the protagonist of Mark Twains famous book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ...

The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and a metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Melville's Moby-Dick and Bartleby the Scrivener as a precursor to 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. Melville's choice to set the novel on April Fool's Day underlines the work's satirical nature, and potentially reflects Melville's worldview, once expressed in a letter to his friend Henry Savage: "All that happens to a man in this life is only by way of a joke." In the modern world, sincerity is the elusive virtue of speaking truly about ones feelings, thoughts, desires. ... In philosophy, it is important to distinguish between two senses of identity, qualitative identity and numerical identity. ... Morality in the strictest sense of the word, deals with that which is universally regarded as right or wrong. ... Religion, sometimes used interchangeably with faith, is commonly defined as belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the practices and institutions associated with such belief. ... Materialism refers to how a person or group chooses to spend their resources, particularly money and time. ... // Defining irony Irony is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. ... Cynicism was originally the philosophy of a group of ancient Greeks called the Cynics (main article), founded by Antisthenes. ... Bartleby the Scrivener is a short story by Herman Melville. ... Gods death or nonexistence is a quintessential nihilistic concern. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views the individual, the self, the individuals experience, and the uniqueness therein as the basis for understanding the nature of human existence. ... Absurdism is a philosophy stating basically that the efforts of man to find meaning in the universe will ultimately fail because no such meaning exists (at least in relation to man). ... A world view, also spelled as worldview is a term calqued from the German word Weltanschauung (look onto the world). The German word is also in wide use in English, as well as the translated form world outlook. ...

External Links

• Critical reaction to and a publishing history of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade from The Life and Works of Herman Melville
• Online text of the novel from the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library