# The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor

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- Book: [The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor](https://www.bookquiver.com/herman-melville/the-confidence-man-and-billy-budd-sailor) ([The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/herman-melville/the-confidence-man-and-billy-budd-sailor.md))
- Authors: [Herman Melville](https://www.bookquiver.com/herman-melville)
- Publisher: Penguin
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-01-4197-438-5
- Published: 2012-05-31
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## Description

With an essay by Daniel G. Hoffmann. 'Life is a pic-nic en costume ; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool' In The Confidence-Man , Melville's unnerving and hallucinatory satire on the American dream, a slippery trickster and master of disguise comes to swindle his fellow passengers - who themselves may also be con-men - aboard a Mississippi steamboat. Billy Budd, Sailor , published after Melville's death in 1891, is a gripping allegory of good and evil, as an innocent man, pressed into service on a British man-of-war, is falsely accused of mutiny. Both these late works are animated with the dark genius of the greatest of American writers. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.