When Pierre was published one year after Moby-Dick, expectations were high. Readers expected—and Melville delivered—adventure, humor, and brilliance. Magnificent and strange ...

"I prefer not to," he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared. Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world—even those daunted ...

Seven stories deal with a slave rebellion, an obstinate copyist, an accidental murder, a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, and a bachelors' dinner party

The hardships of life at sea and the realities of distant cities provide young Redburn with a startling introduction to the world

In 1843, after three years of voyaging in the South Seas, Melville signed up as an ordinary seaman on the man-of-war United States, and headed for home. What he observed on ...

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 ...

Killing a sixty-ton sperm whale that could destroy a boat with a flick of its massive tail was no easy task. Whalemen of the early nineteenth century were not just hunters ...

The author's comic experiences in a South Seas setting has him working at odd jobs, viewing traditional rites and customs, and even contriving an audience with the Tahitian Queen.

Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby, the Scrivener are two of the most revered shorter works of fiction in history. Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a ...