Salesman of the Year: The Confidence Artist in Sinclair Lewis and Season One of Fargo

In “The Rooster Prince,” the second episode of the first season of Fargo (FX, 2014–), enigmatic hitman Lester Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) wanders into a post office in Duluth, Minnesota, and requests a package from a postmaster. When the postmaster demands to see some identification, Malvo refuses and proceeds to stare down the worker until he relinquishes a manila envelope. Malvo opens the package and studies the contents of the envelope; upon reading the missive, he declares: “I guess I’m a preacher now.”¹ By adopting a new role, Malvo becomes a de facto confidence artist: a character adept at manipulating others for personal gain.

Literary scholar Gary Lindberg defines the confidence artist as “a manipulator or contriver, who creates an inner effect, an impression, an experience of confidence, that surpasses the grounds for it.”² This archetype is seen throughout American cultural history, and Noah Hawley’s television adaptation of Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 film is rife with characters who attempt to manipulate others in any manner of ways and for a variety of reasons. In creating a world where confidence artists appear around every corner, Hawley and his fellow writers appear to draw inspiration from the prominent midwestern author Sinclair Lewis. A native of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Lewis gained fame in the 1920s with novels like Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), and Arrowsmith (1925) that not only satirized the Midwest and middle-class life, but also featured a litany of characters who actively swindle others or, at the very least, share traits with confidence artists. By crafting characters like Lorne Malvo and Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) who shift between personas and utilize the tools of the con to manipulate characters, Hawley and his writers build connections to similar themes and characters in the works of Lewis. Even more importantly, the Fargo television series illustrates how the confidence artist and confidence scheme can reveal places in both midwestern and American society where the tenets of work, sincerity, and faith are far from stable.

Historically, the confidence artist (con artist) has held a dualistic meaning in American culture. Since colonial times, the confidence scheme has been denounced by commentators as an activity devoid of honesty and industry—a sentiment often seen in the condemnations toward Ponzi schemes, emails scams, or other hustles. As Karen Halttunen notes, Americans during the nineteenth century saw the rise of confidence men as a marker of the general decay of the fabric of American society.³ However, some Americans held the confidence scheme and its purveyors in a more positive light. At times, the confidence artist was, as Lindberg argues, a “covert hero” for many Americans—a figure that not only was a symbol of the dynamism of the Republic, but who also revealed the fluidity of social structures.⁴ This reading of the confidence artist as a subversive agent is echoed by Jackson Lears, who observes, “Despite the reverence paid to the plodder on ceremonial occasions, though, Americans admired the sharper [confidence artist] [as the] country . . . remained fascinated by the art of deception.”⁵ In addition, Americans would quickly understand that the confidence artist was near-ubiquitous in American society and manifests in a range of types. Lindberg identifies the criminal whose “motive for making belief is illicit gain” and notes that if the con artist’s “motive is to spread the air of belief, [then] we are dealing with the booster.” And if the artist’s motivation is “self-creation, the agent is the familiar self-made man.”⁶

Because of the confidence artist’s complexity, many writers with mid-western backgrounds have crafted works that center on this figure and their marks. But perhaps no midwestern author was as enamored with confidence artists as Sinclair Lewis, who was fascinated by the hypocrisy and duplicity of American life on national and regional levels. Lewis populated his works with numerous overt confidence artists, as well as characters who display aspects of this archetype. In several of his most famous works, Lewis centers on characters who—in the broader sense of...