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In his ninth and last novel, ethnic observer, novelist, and poet Herman Melville provides us a picture of everything incorrect with America in the decade preceding the Civil War. Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this is a tale of interlocking stories from several steamboat passengers going down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. Aboard the Fidèle are available all types of con men, from those offering stock in failing companies and natural and organic cure-all "medicines" to those who are nurturing money for intended charitable organizations and the ones who simply ask for money outright. One man sneaks aboard dispatch to test the so-called self confidence of the travellers, and many people are pressured to confront that in which he places his trust before journey's end. Mixing his hallmark satirical style with allegory and metaphysical treatise, Melville's The Confidence-Man is a precursor to the 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.
