This is 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" contains 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.
