num_pages: 319
description: Is the confidence man a secret American culture hero? In this broad cultural study, Lindberg shows how Americans have been drawn to acts of faith and gestures of self-creation and how they rise to the promise while suspecting the deception. The confidence man exploits this paradoxical attitude in roles ranging from self-made man and booster to survivor and jack-of-all-trades. Lindberg explains how the cult of the confidence man developed in the auspicious mixture of old patterns and new opportunities during the European settlement of North America. He traces the culture of the confidence man through the varying literary guises he assumes in writers from Melville, Poe, Franklin, and Emerson to Twain, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Recent writers like Heller, Ellison, Kerouac, Kesey, and Barth have extended the earlier traditions of the con man, whose game reveals some of the major continuities and ambivalences of American life. Gary H. Lindberg (1941-1986) was Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He was awarded the Ph.D. by Leland Stanford Junior University in 1967 for, in part, his dissertation ‘Edith Wharton and the Rhetoric of Manners’. He was an exceptional scholar and outstanding teacher whose dedication and service to the University of New Hampshire as well as the wider community exemplified the highest academic standards and ideals.
language: English
title: The Confidence Man in American Literature
titlecomplete: The Confidence Man in American Literature
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Oxford University Press