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On April Fool's Day, a Mississippi steamboat called the Fidèle sets off down the river towards New Orleans, carrying a crowd of passengers from every walk of…
On April Fool's Day, a Mississippi steamboat called the Fidèle sets off down the river towards New Orleans, carrying a crowd of passengers from every walk of American life. Among them moves a mysterious stranger, or perhaps a series of strangers, who in one disguise after another, a deaf-mute, a crippled beggar, a charity agent, a herb doctor and a cosmopolitan in fancy clothes, asks each passenger for one thing: confidence, in him, in humanity and in God.
Context and significance
Herman Melville published the novel on April Fool's Day 1857, and it was the last novel published in his lifetime; its dark, philosophical comedy baffled readers then and fascinates them now. Read Melville's Moby-Dick and Bartleby, the Scrivener.
About the author
Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York to a family ruined when he was a boy. At twenty he went to sea, sailed on a whaler to the Pacific, deserted in the Marquesas Islands and turned the adventure into Typee, a bestseller that made him famous at twenty-seven.
His ambitions grew with each book, and Moby-Dick, published in 1851, was misunderstood and sold poorly. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing poems and the stories Bartleby, the Scrivener and Billy Budd, and died almost forgotten; he was rediscovered as a great writer in the 1920s.