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Zusatztext “The great transcendental satire.” —Carl Van Vechten Informationen zum Autor Herman Melville was an American Renaissance novelist, poet, and short story writer who lived from August 1, 1819, to September 28, 1891. His most well-known pieces are Typee (1846), a romanticized narrative of his experiences in Polynesia; Moby-Dick (1851); and Billy Budd, Sailor, a novella that was released after his death. Although Melville was no longer well-known to the general public at the time of his death, a Melville renaissance began in 1919, the year of his birth. In the end, Moby-Dick was regarded as one of the best American novels. The third child of a wealthy merchant who died in 1832, leaving the family in terrible financial shape, Melville was born in New York City. He sailed as a common sailor in 1839, first as a whaler Acushnet and subsequently as a merchant ship. However, he abandoned ship in the Marquesas Islands. His first work, Typee, and its follow-up, Omoo (1847), were travelogues inspired by his interactions with the island peoples. He was able to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of Boston lawyer Lemuel Shaw, because to their prosperity. His debut novel not drawn from personal experience, Mardi (1849), was not well received. Klappentext "In The Confidence-Man,” writes John Bryant in his Introduction, "Melville found a way to render our tragic sense of self and society through the comic strategies of the confidence game. He puts the reader in the game to play its parts and to contemplate the inconsistencies of its knaves and fools.” Set on a Mississippi steamer on April Fool's Day and populated by a series of shape-shifting con men, The Confidence-Man is a challenging metaphysical and ethical exploration of antebellum American society. Set from the first American edition of 1857, this Modern Library paperback includes an Appendix with Bryant's innovative "fluid text” analysis of early manuscript fragments from Melville's novel. CHAPTER I A mute goes aboard a boat on the Mississippi At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis. His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger. In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite steamer Fidèle, on the point of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, but evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities, he held on his way along the lower deck until he chanced to come to a placard nigh the captain’s office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given; but what purported to be a careful description of his person followed. As if it had been a theatre-bill, crowds were gathered about the announcement, and among them certain chevaliers, whose eyes, it was plain, were on the capitals, or, at least, earnestly seeking sight of them from behind intervening coats; but as for their fingers, they were enveloped in some myth; though, during a chance interval, one of these chevaliers somewhat showed his hand in purchasing from another chevalier, ex-officio a peddler of money-belts, one of his popular safe-guards, while another peddler, who was still another versatile chevalier, hawked, in the thick of the throng, the lives of Measan, the bandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi, and th...
