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...Con artists are familiar figures in American literature, though they are usually directed through culture's back door. Their calling card was written by a 19th century popular comic character named Simon Suggs: "It is good to be shifty in a new country." Gary Lindberg's elaborate study The Confidence Man in American Literature, uses Suggs and his cronies as models to examine the national character. The task requires the assistance of that old critical handyman, ambivalence...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: High Diddle-Diddling | 12/28/1981 | See Source »

...news that public condemnation of the con man is mixed with private admiration for his sting. More than 50 years ago, V.L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought noted that the sharpster appealed to the hidden desires of an otherwise hardworking, pious people. Lindberg considers the ambivalent attitude to be not hypocrisy but rather a theoretical expression of American genius. A con man may impoverish widows and orphans, but he cannot do so without first creating confidence. And confidence, says the author, who is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, is what America...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: High Diddle-Diddling | 12/28/1981 | See Source »

...uses metaphysical doubletalk to "explain" philosophy. The patter creates credibility, leading Poe to conclude elsewhere that "pleased at comprehending, we often are so excited as to take it for granted that we assent." In "Diddling: Considered as One of the Exact Sciences," he offers the ingredients of a good con: "Minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: High Diddle-Diddling | 12/28/1981 | See Source »

Many a used car and intellectual lemon have been sold with his formula. Lindberg does not label Poe a confidence man but a "New World technician." Yet tech man and con man are related by method. Writes Lindberg: "When the New World technician reduces complex process to duplicable parts, he provides the model by which the con man reduces another's gestures to imitable steps and dissects habits of belief so as to manipulate them...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: High Diddle-Diddling | 12/28/1981 | See Source »

With the publication of P.T. Barnum's autobiography in 1855, says Lindberg, the con man in America went public. The rush to grab land, swindle immigrants and kite stock gathered momentum. As a great showman, Barnum hoodwinked the suckers and made them like it. Who could hate a man able to move crowds by changing the exit sign to one that read, "This way to the Grand Egress." His book ratified cynicism as entertainment, if not instruction...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: High Diddle-Diddling | 12/28/1981 | See Source »

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