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...

Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War figure Israel Potter--based on Potter's own obscure narrative Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter--and featuring characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen. In offering the manuscript to his publisher, Melville assured him, "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." This came as a relief,...

This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces.

The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and...

Melville's long poem "Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land" (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos of almost 18,000 lines, about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.
But modern critics have found "Clarel" a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of "The Waste Land. "It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life....

The letters by and to Melville in this volume extend from letters he wrote at the age of nine in 1828 to ones he sent and received during the year before his death at seventy-two in 1891. To fill the gaps within the correspondence, 542 editorial entries are chronologically interspersed for letters both by and to Melville for which no full text has been located but for which some evidence survives.
This scholarly edition presents a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting or other surviving evidence permits. Fifty-two newly discovered letters by Melville, more...

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...

Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War figure Israel Potter--based on Potter's own obscure narrative Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter--and featuring characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen. In offering the manuscript to his publisher, Melville assured him, "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." This came as a relief,...

Presented as narratives of his own South Sea experiences, Melville's first two books had roused incredulity in many readers. Their disbelief, he declared, had been "the main inducement" in altering his plan for his third book, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849). Melville wanted to exploit the "rich poetical material" of Polynesia and also to escape feeling "irked, cramped, & fettered" by a narrative of facts. "I began to feel . . . a longing to plume my pinions for a flight," he told his English publisher.

Mardi began as a sequel to Typee (1846) and Omoo...

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...