The Penguin English Library Edition of The Confidence - Man and Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville
'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.
- ISBN10 014119930X
- ISBN13 9780141199306
- Publish Date 31 May 2012
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 29 June 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Imprint Penguin Classics
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 448
- Language English