Herman Melville

A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fanatical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab's passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul. Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel,...

Billy, a foundling from Bristol, has an innocence, good looks and a natural charisma that make him popular with the crew. His only physical defect is a stutter which grows worse when under intense emotion...

An aging lawyer hires a new copyist to help with his firm's workload, and at first he finds himself pleased with his new employee. Bartleby is quiet, efficient and he doesn't display any of the loud eccentricities of the firm's other two copyists, Nippers and Turkey. But one day, when the lawyer asks Bartleby if he will help him compare copies, Bartleby simply replies, "I would prefer not to." As time goes by and Bartleby's strange refusals multiply,...

Like a microcosm of America, the Fidele, a Mississippi steamboat bound for New Orleans, floats downstream without reaching its goal, its passengers all the victims or abusers of trust or confidence.

In Manhattan, an elderly lawyer's business is growing. Having two scriveners in his employ, the lawyer advertises for a third to meet demand. Enter Bartleby, a glum albeit quality scrivener. However, the lawyer quickly discovers that something is off with his new employee. When asked to perform any duties outside of copying, Bartleby responds with a canned I would prefer not to. Soon Bartleby is living at the office and performing less and less at...

The young adventurous sailors, Tommo and Toby, abandon ship and flee into the jungle of an island in French Polynesia. But their feelings of victory will be short-lived. Because they are about to run straight into the hands of the Typee, the most feared of the battling cannibal tribes. Inspired by his own adventures, twenty-five-year-old Herman Melville wrote 'Typee' (1846) as a blend of creative memoir, cultural commentary, and good story-telling....

Perhaps Melville's most difficult and wildly textured work, "Pierre, or The Ambiguities", to this day evades easy categorization or critical interpretation. Now seen as an ambitious foray into proto-modernist composition, the text was initially met with utter consternation and was a commercial failure. Published a year after "Moby Dick", this novel tracks the nineteen-year-old Pierre Glendinning through his life in New York City as a fledgling novelist....

"The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" is the 1857 novel by Herman Melville, his ninth and final work. It tells the interlocking stories of a group of travelers aboard a steamboat on the Mississippi River making their way towards New Orleans. Emulating the style of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", the novel centers on its title character, the Confidence-Man, a mysterious figure who sneaks aboard the steamboat and successively tests the confidence of...

Beautifully designed, classic edition of Melville's original tale...discovered unfinished in the author's desk shortly after his death. Billy Budd, a cheerful, good looking sailor with a natural charisma and innocence that makes him popular with the crew, is aboard a British ship during the Napoleonic wars. His only physical defect is a stutter which grows worse when under intense stress. Budd arouses the antagonism of the ship's bitter master-at-arms,...

Don Benito faltered; then, like some somnambulist suddenly interfered with, vacantly stared at his visitor, and ended by looking down on the deck. He maintained this posture so long, that Captain Delano, almost equally disconcerted, and involuntarily almost as rude, turned suddenly from him, walking forward to accost one of the Spanish seamen for the desired information. But he had hardly gone five paces, when with a sort of eagerness Don Benito invited...