"Redburn" is a fictional narrative of a boy's first voyage, based loosely on Melville's own first voyage to and from Liverpool in 1839. Hastily composed and little esteemed by its author, "Redburn" was more highly thought of by his critics, who saw it regaining the ground of popular sea stories like "Typee" and "Omoo."
Melville so disliked the novel that he submitted it to his publisher without polishing it. This scholarly edition corrects a number of errors that have persisted in subsequent editions. Based on collations of the editions published during his lifetime, it incorporates...

Redburn is a fictional narrative of a boy's first voyage, based loosely on Melville's own first voyage to and from Liverpool in 1839. Hastily composed and little esteemed by its author, Redburn was more highly thought of by his critics, who saw it regaining the ground of popular sea stories like Typee and Omoo.
Melville so disliked the novel that he submitted it to his publisher without polishing it. This scholarly edition corrects a number of errors that have persisted in subsequent editions. Based on collations of the editions published during his lifetime,...

Almost from the time of its publication early in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic in the literature of travel and adventure. From the beginning, however, there have been problems with the text. Due to disparities between the American and English editions, and revisions Melville had to make at his publisher's request concerning its racy style and attitude toward missionaries, the book has circulated in two versions.
This scholarly edition is based on collations of all editions published during his lifetime,...

Almost from the time of its publication in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic in the literature of travel and adventure. Although initially rejected as too fantastic to be true, Typee was immensely popular and regarded in Melville's lifetime as his best work. It established his reputation as the literary discoverer of the South Seas and inspired the likes of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Two common sailors jump ship and are held in benign captivity by Polynesian natives. Through the narrator's eyes we...

Herman Melville wrote "White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War "during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his memories of naval life, having spent fourteen months as an ordinary seaman aboard a frigate as it sailed the Pacific and made the homeward voyage around Cape Horn.
Already that same summer Melville had written" Redburn, " and he regarded the books as "two "jobs, " which I have done for money--being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood." The reviewers were not as hard on "White-Jacket "as Melville himself was. The English liked its praise of...

Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, "Pierre, or The Ambiguities" has since struck critics as modern in its psychological probings and literary technique--fit, as Carl Van Vechten said in 1922, to be ranked with "The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, " and "Ulysses." None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.
This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as the surviving evidence...

In Moby Dick Melville set out to write a "mighty book" on "a mighty theme." The editors of this critical text affirm that he succeeded. Nevertheless, their prolonged examination of the novel reveals textual flaws and anomalies that help to explain Melville's fears that his great work was in some ways a hash or a botch. A lengthy historical note also gives a fresh account of Melville's earlier literary career and his working conditions as he wrote; it also analyzes the book's contemporary reception and outlines how it finally achieved fame. Other sections review theories of the book's...

In Moby Dick Melville set out to write a "mighty book" on "a mighty theme." The editors of this critical text affirm that he succeeded. Nevertheless, their prolonged examination of the novel reveals textual flaws and anomalies that help to explain Melville's fears that his great work was in some ways a hash or a botch. A lengthy historical note also gives a fresh account of Melville's earlier literary career and his working conditions as he wrote; it also analyzes the book's contemporary reception and outlines how it finally achieved fame. Other sections review theories of the book's...

Long considered Melville's strangest novel, "The Confidence-Man" is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-nineteenth century America. A shape-shifting Confidence-Man approaches passengers on a Mississippi River steamboat and, winning over his not-quite-innocent victims with his charms, urges each to trust in the cosmos, in nature, and even in human nature--with predictable results. In Melville's time the book was such a failure he abandoned fiction writing for twenty years; only in the twentieth century did critics celebrate its technical virtuosity, wit, comprehensive...

In this new edition of The Piazza Tales, the editors of the acclaimed Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville have used the original magazine versions for five of the six stories in order to present the most accurate tests of these works. Here, in such famous stories as -Bartleby, the Scrivener- and -The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, - we find Melville's imagination and style at its best. Of the less well known tales, the humor in -The Piazza- and -The Lightning-Rod Man, - and the gothic horror of -The Bell Tower, - command attention as well. Whether in the...