num_pages: 376
description: Onboard the Fidele, a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous guises - from a legless beggar and a worldly businessman to a collector for charitable causes and a cosmopolitan' gentleman, who simply swindles a barber out of the price of a shave. Making very little from his hoaxes, the pleasure of trickery seems an end in itself for this slippery conman. Is he the Devil? Is his chicanery merely intended to expose the mercenary concerns of those around him? Set on April Fool's Day, The Confidence-Man (1857) is an engaging comedy of masquerades, digressions and shifting identity, and a devastating satire on the American dream.
language: English
title: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Reviews, Criticism and an Annotated Bibliography
titlecomplete: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Reviews, Criticism and an Annotated Bibliography (A Norton Critical Edition)
genres: Classics, United States, Crime, Fiction, The United States Of America, Novels, Literature, 19th Century, American, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 3145
publisher: W. W. Norton