“Some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.” Herman Melville's sense of the world as untrustworthy, as a shroud over a deeper reality captured something essential about this time and place. For such was the world that swallowed Billy Vanderbilt: a netherworld populated by those artificial persons called corporations that masked the real persons behind them; by paper money, that masked real gold and silver; by whispered rumors, that masked the manipulations of self-serving men.
