Imposture or con artistry has always been central to US capitalism and culture. The con artist represents both flip side and dark side to standard American myths of self-making and frontier individualism, beginning with Ben Franklin’s fictionalized performance of self and continuing through P.T. Barnum’s self-conscious charlatanism and into our own contemporary celebrity spectacle. This course examines the long history of imposture through US literary and artistic representations that might include primary examples such as the work of Franklin, Alger, and Barnum alongside critical depictions of this phenomenon as exemplified by the output of Brockden Brown, Melville, Larsen, Fitzgerald, and Highsmith among others. We will finally examine—in this regard—the ways in which historically marginalized groups have used other sorts of imposture—from passing to drag—to survive and subvert an oppressive social order.