Herman Melville
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The Confidence Man (1857) is a novel by American writer Herman Melville. After the failure of his novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville struggled to find a publisher who would accept his work. When it was published, The Confidence Man was seen as a flawed, unnecessarily complicated novel, and beyond several collections of poetry, it all but ended Melville's career as a professional writer. When Melville's work was...
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The truth is, my wife, like all the rest of the world, cares not a fig for my philosophical jabber. Thus wrote Melville in 1856, in the house where he had penned 'Moby-Dick" some six years earlier (Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts). An allegorical tale that reveals a very unsettling home life and professional life for this American genius, who by the time this story was published was nearly forgotten.
3) The Piazza
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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...
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Widely believed to be among Melville's most popular works, "Redburn, His First Voyage" follows the young Wellingborough Redburn on his first journey at sea. A boy just on the verge of manhood, Redburn's decision to become a sailor is apparently at odds with his gentle upbringing, which has made him in many ways unprepared for the hardships of his chosen profession. He is unmercifully initiated into the life of a sailor by his fellow crewmen, a trying...
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The various prose sketches here reprinted were first published by Melville, some in Harper's and some in Putnam's magazines, during the years from 1850 to 1856. "Hawthorne and His Mosses," the only piece of criticism in this collection, is particularly interesting viewed in the light of Melville's friendship with Hawthorne while they were neighbors at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The other sketches cover a variety of homely subjects treated by Melville...
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HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.
'Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!'
It is the end of the eighteenth century, and the navy recruits the eponymous hero - the 'Handsome Sailor' - to its fleet. Accused of mutinous behaviour, Billy Budd is forced to defend himself, but his fearful, silent response soon gives way to a terrible act of violence. The consequences are disastrous, and...
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This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.Although most people do not think of Herman Melville as a particularly funny writer, his "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and The Confidence Man have kept readers laughing for a century and a half.
"Bartleby" is a simultaneously accurate and absurd depiction of life in a Wall Street office in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is the gentle comedy of a boss' helpless...
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"Es lunes, aunque no importa –podría ser cualquier otro día laborable–. El abogado y propietario de la oficina, por el bien de todos, designa a cada uno de sus subalternos las tareas que hay que resolver. Tres sencillas palabras, pronunciadas por el último empleado contratado, harán que, desde esos despachos, el mundo comience a tambalearse.
Con su «preferiría no hacerlo», Bartleby deja perplejo a todo aquel incapaz de ver más allá de...
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"The Encantadas" (or Enchanted Isles), is a series of ten descriptive sketches, and a reminiscence from Melville's sailor days revealing the ecologically pristine Galápagos Islands as both enchanting and horrifying. Containing some of Melville's "most memorable prose", The Encantadas were a critical success at a time when Melville's fortunes were down. After publication, the New York Dispatch cited the chapters as universally considered among the...
10) Benito Cereno
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A fictionalized account about the revolt on a 19th-century Spanish slavery ship, Benito Cereno was first published in three installments in 1855. Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts, Jr. called the story "an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South." The famous question of what had cast such a shadow upon Cereno was used by American...
11) The Bell-Tower
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Considered to be the least characteristic of Melville's stories, somewhat resembling the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bell-Tower" is a dark literary work that explores, though never fully reveals, its central mystery. An eccentric artist and architect dreams up plans for a magnificent bell tower. After receiving approval from the city, he happily begins construction. When city residents begin to notice strange occurrences...
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Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, with an illustration by Henry Louis Stephens, "The Lightning-Rod Man" was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, The Lightning-rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult...
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Bartleby, el escribiente es una profunda y enigmática novela escrita por Herman Melville. Ambientada en un bullicioso bufete de abogados de Wall Street, en la Nueva York de mediados del siglo XIX, la historia sigue la vida del excéntrico Bartleby, un escribiente que abruptamente deja de dedicarse a su trabajo, pronunciando la frase preferiría no hacerlo cada vez que se le encomienda una tarea.
La magistral narración de Melville teje un rico tapiz...
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Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales, by Herman Melville, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies...
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If you don't know Melville's letters to Hawthorne, you don't know Melville. These letters are full of passion, humor, doubt, and spiritual yearning, and offer an intimate view of Melville's personality. Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy. The Divine...
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"Llamadme Ismael." Muy pocos personajes literarios hay hoy tan conocidos como la ballena blanca, o Ismael o el capitán Ajab, y probablemente no haya un inicio de novela tan famoso como el de Moby-Dick. Concebida por Herman Melville como respuesta norteamericana a la gran literatura europea de finales del siglo XVIII y principios del XIX, Moby-Dick recoge la tradición romántica y gótica dando forma a un épico poema que ha llegado a ocupar en Estados...
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In this spirited saga, a promising young soldier is wounded at the battle of Bunker Hill, sets sail with John Paul Jones, and undertakes espionage at the behest of Benjamin Franklin. Herman Melville drew upon the obscure memoirs of a Revolutionary War veteran to create his only historical novel, combining Israel Potter's real-life reminiscences with fictional incidents that lead his hero into encounters with noteworthy figures of colonial America....
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Typee is the first book by American writer Herman Melville, published in the early part of 1846, when Melville was 26 years old. Considered a classic in travel and adventure literature, the narrative is based on the author's actual experiences on the island Nuku Hiva in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands in 1842, supplemented with imaginative reconstruction and research from other books. The title comes from the valley of Taipivai, once known as...