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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9780940450240
ISBN: 0940450240
Label: Library of America
Manufacturer: Library of America
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 1478
Publication Date: 1985-04-01
Publisher: Library of America
Studio: Library of America

Herman Melville's dark and brilliant late works contain some of his most powerful writing. After "Moby-Dick" he turned from the high seas to record his keen, bleak vision of life at home in America. "Pierre," "Israel Potter," and "The Confidence-Man," satirical dissections of moral breakdown and social hypocrisy, anticipate modernist fiction with their black humor and formal experimentation. With them here are "The Piazza Tales"--including "Bartelby the Scrivener," "The Encantadas," and "Benito Cereno"--and the haunting, posthumously published masterpiece, "Billy Budd, Sailor." Rounding out this third volume of Melville's complete prose in the Library of America are many pieces rarely collected, including magazine stories, comic sketches, and reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Francis Parkman, and James Fenimore Cooper.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: It ain't all Moby Dick
Review: If you think that you can't read classic American Literature because it's all so big and intimidating (i.e., Moby Dick) think again. Some of the short stories in this collection of Melville's "other" work are incredibly well-written insights into human nature. (As is Moby Dick, but I digress).

Billy Budd's encounter with "justice," Bartleby's statement that he would "prefer not", Benito Cerino's exploration of slavery-- these tales are not to be missed. You should read this book as a starter, then move on to the BIG OLD white whale.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Lonesome Latter Years
Review: Darkly humorous, cynical, horrific and melancholy, Melville's later works are the capstone to the author's deepening discontent with his America. The vision here can be frustrating: Melville conjures up the most painful, soul-searching mysteries, and then refuses to knot them up with tidy solutions. Instead, Melville deepens the moral ambiguity that seeped through the skin of the transitional Moby Dick in full-length works like Pierre and Billy Budd, Sailor. And the shorter works--among them The Piazza Tales, Benito Cereno, and Bartleby the Scrivener--are imbued with such a longing for any kind of graspable meaning, that their readers, like their characters, find themselves in a ponderous state of shock. The human condition, Melville seems to say, is one of isolation, cast adrift, searching alone for a truth that is, and always will be, inscrutable.

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