PEL Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor [Penguin]

In The Confidence-Man, Melvilles 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 Melvilles 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.