Through Billy Budd, a sailor sentenced to death after striking his false accuser, Melville explores the difference between earthly and divine justice.

A failed mutiny lands the narrator in a Tahitian jail where he and his companion, Doctor Long Ghost, are treated with curiosity and kindness. After their eventual release, the two embark on a series of adventures as they work at odd jobs, view traditional rites and customs on the island, and contrive an audience with the Tahitian queen. Thought-provoking, humorous glimpses of a vanished 19th-century world in the South Seas.

"Redburn charts the coming-of-age of Wellingborough Redburn, a young innocent who embarks on a crossing to Liverpool together with a roguish crew. Once in Liverpool, Redburn encounters the squalid conditions of the city and meets Harry Bolton, a bereft and damaged soul, who takes him on a tour of London that includes a scene of rococo decadence.

"Unlike Melville's fiction, his poetry remains obscure. The last "collected poems" appeared in 1947 and "selected poems" in the 1970s, and only two books dealing exclusively with Melville's poetry have appeared to date, both published in the 1970s. In this revised edition of his Poems of Herman Melville, Douglas Robillard updates the scholarship on the poetry through his introduction and notes and makes a case for a revised estimate of the importance...

Land 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 and 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...

Included are two sea tales that encompass the essence of Melville's art: "Benito Cereno", an exhilarating account of mutiny and rescue aboard a disabled slave ship, which is a parable of man's struggle against the forces of evil, and "The Encantadas", ten allegorical sketches of the Galapagos Islands, which reveal nature to be both enchanting and horrifying. Two pieces explore themes of isolation and defeat found in Melville's great novels: "Bartelby,...

The first edition of Melville's tales and poems in fifty years and the only one currently in print, this edition presents Melville's full array of short works as they appeared in magazines, private printings and manuscript, along with a generous sampling of his most significant poetry (an unjustly neglected facet of his ouvre). Senior Melvillean John Bryant brings extensive scholarly experience to the task; along with such classics as Bartleby the...