Although he surprised the world in 1866 with his first published book of poetry, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, Herman Melville had long been steeped in poetry. This new offering in the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry series, The Writings of Herman Melville, with a historical note by Hershel Parker, is testament to Melville the poet. Penultimate in the publication of the series, Published Poems follows the release of Melville’s verse epic, Clarel (1876), and with it, contains the entirety of the poems published during Melville’s lifetime: Battle-Pieces, as well as John Marr and Other Sailors, with Some Sea-Pieces (1888), and Timoleon Etc. (1891). Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War has long been recognized as a great contribution to the poetry of the Civil War, comparable only to Whitman’s Drum-Taps. Its idiosyncrasies, many of them grounded in British poetry, kept it from immediate popularity, but it was not the production of a novice. Melville had made himself over into a poet in the late 1850s and had tried to publish a previous collection of poetry—now lost—in 1860. John Marr and Other Sailors is a retrospective nautical book. Its portraits of sailors were influenced by Melville’s own experience of aging as well as by his long acquaintance with wasted mariners at the Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island, where his brother was governor. The book modulates into "Sea-Pieces," including the grisly "Maldive Shark" and "To Ned," a powerful reflection on how Melville’s personal adventures with the Typee islanders in 1842 had accrued rich historical significance over the decades. Thematically less unified, Timoleon Etc. contains poems with many European and exotic settings from ancient to modern times. The most famous are "After the Pleasure Party" and "The Age of the Antonines." Published in the last year of Melville’s life, some of the poems were first written many years earlier; for example, Melville copied "The Age of the Antonines" out for his brother-in-law in 1877, describing it as something found in a bundle of old papers. One whole section seems to have been almost entirely salvaged from the unpublished 1860 volume of poetry. As with the other volumes in the Northwestern-Newberry series, the aim of this edition of Published Poems is to present a text as close to the author’s intention as surviving evidence permits. To that end, the editorial appendix includes a historical note by Hershel Parker, the dean of Melville scholars, which gives a compelling, in-depth account of how one of America’s greatest writers grew into the vocation of a poet; an essay by G. Thomas Tanselle on the printing and publishing history of the works in Published Poems; a textual record that identifies the copy-texts for the present edition and explains the editorial policy; and substantial scholarly notes on individual poems.
This trade edition of Moby-Dick is a reduced version of the Arion Press Moby-Dick, which was published in 1979 in a limited edition of 250 copies and has been hailed as a modern masterpiece of bookmaking. It was hand set under the supervision of one of America's finest book designers and printers. The initial letters that begin each chapter were designed especially for this book and christened "Leviathan." The illustrations, of places, creatures, objects or tools, and processes connected with nineteenth-century whaling, are original boxwood engravings by Massachusetts artist Barry Moser. The text of Moby-Dick used in this edition is based on that used in the critical edition of Melville's works published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library. This reduced version is smaller in size than the Arion edition and the California deluxe edition, but it includes all of the original pages and illustrations. It is printed in black only throughout, and it is not slipcased.
Welcome to the Essential Novelists book series, were we present to you the best works of remarkable authors. For this book, the literary critic August Nemo has chosen the two most important and meaningful novels of Herman Melville which are Moby Dick and Billy Budd. Celebrated American author Herman Melville wrote 'Moby-Dick' and several other sea-adventure novels, before turning to poetry later in his literary career. Novels selected for this book: - Moby Dick - Billy Budd This is one of many books in the series Essential Novelists. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the authors.
Whitman and Dickinson are the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, but who is the third? Some critics say Whittier, others say Poe, and these days an increasing number say Herman Melville. The revaluation of Melville's poetry is due in large part to the influence of this landmark volume, for Melville the poet has never found a more judicious, eloquent, or persuasive champion than Robert Penn Warren.
Well over a century after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Forgoing the narratives of the sea that prevailed in his earlier works, Melville’s later fiction contains some of the finest and many of his keenest and bleakest observations of life, not on the high seas, but at home in America. With the publication of this Library of America volume, the third of three volumes, all Melville’s fiction has now been restored to print for the first time. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, published in 1852 (the year after Moby-Dick), moves between the idyllic Berkshire countryside and the nightmare landscape of early New York City. Its hero, a young American patrician trying to redeem the secret sins of his father, elopes to the city, discovers Bohemian life, attempts a literary epic, and struggles his way through incest, murder, and madness. Long a controversial work, it is Melville’s darkest satire of American life and letters and one of his most powerful books. A pivotal work, both for Melville’s career and for American literature, Pierre was followed by Israel Potter, the story of a veteran of the Revolution, victim of a thousand mischances, and a long-suffering exile in England. Along the way are memorable episodes of war and intrigue, with personal portraits of Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and George III. In the exploits of this touchingly optimistic soldier, Melville offers a scathing image of the collapse of revolutionary hopes. The Piazza Tales demonstrates Melville’s dazzling mastery of many styles, including “The Encantadas,” about nature’s two faces—enchanting and horrific; the famous “Bartleby the Scrivener,” about a Wall Street copyist who “would prefer not to”; and the enigmatic “Benito Cereno,” about a credulous Yankee sea captain who stumbles into an intricately plotted mutiny aboard a disabled slave ship. The Confidence-Man, Melville’s last published novel, is in many ways a forerunner of modernist American fiction. An extended meditation on faith, hope, and charity as these are manifested on board a Mississippi riverboat one April Fools’ Day, it presents a menagerie of Americans buying and selling, borrowing and lending, believing and mistrusting, as they are carried toward the auction blocks of New Orleans. Many pieces never before collected are also included: the “Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack” (burlesque sketches of Zachary Taylor’s Mexican campaign), “Fragments from a Writing-Desk” (Melville’s earliest surviving prose), reviews of Hawthorne, Parkman, and Cooper, and all the tales Melville published in magazines during the 1850s. Finally, there is the posthumously published masterpiece Billy Budd, Sailor, the haunting story of a beautiful, innocent sailor who is pressed into naval service, slandered, provoked to murder, and sacrificed to military justice. While encouraging questions for which there are no answers, it invites us to meditate on the conflicts central to all Melville’s work: between freedom and fate, innocence and civilized corruption. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
An unprecedented single-volume edition of one of America's greatest poets, released to celebrate his bicentennial Best known today for his novels and stories, the author of Moby-Dick was a devoted and accomplished poet. Ranging from Civil War battlefields to the haunted byways of the Holy Land, from close observation of nature to deep philosophical mediation, Melville's poetry was central to his life and art and he justly ranks with Whitman and Dickinson as one of America's three greatest 19th-century poets. Complete here for the first time in the fourth and final installment in the Library of America's Herman Melville edition, are all four books of poetry he published in his lifetime plus uncollected poems and the poems from two projected volumes left unfinished at the time of his death, allowing readers to appreciate for themselves the extraordinary range of his poetic achievement. Melville's first book of poetry, Battle-Pieces (1866), remains one of the very few great American books to have emerged from the Civil War. Dedicated to the Union dead, it is both a deeply philosophical work of mourning and a fascinating record of events, tracking campaigns and battles and the war's immediate aftermath. With a cast of characters surpassing that of Moby-Dick, the epic poem Clarel (1876), about an American divinity student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, has been likened to Paradise Lost and The Waste Land as a profound exploration of the problem of belief. Also included in Complete Poems are the two privately issued books John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891), which contain some of Melville's finest lyric verse. Rounding out the volume are the extraordinary poems from his two unfinished manuscripts, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope, along with miscellaneous uncollected poems. All of the poems are presented in the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry texts.
This first volume of The Library of America's three-volume edition of the complete prose works of Herman Melville includes three romances of the South Seas. Typee and Omoo, based on the young Melville's experiences on a whaling ship, are exuberant accounts of the idyllic life among the "cannibals" in Polynesia. They remained his most popular works well into the 20th century. Mardi ("the world" in Polynesian) is a mixture of love story, adventure, and political allegory, set on a mythical Pacific island, that looks forward to the complexities of Moby-Dick. Together, these three romances give early evidence of the genius and daring that make Melville the master novelist of the sea and a precursor of modernist literature. Two companion volumes--Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick and Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, and Billy Budd complete this edition of Melville's prose. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Moby-Dick, Typee, Omoo, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd Sailor, Redburn, White-Jacket, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, John Marr and Other Sailors…
Moby-Dick, Typee, Omoo, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd Sailor, Redburn, White-Jacket, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, John Marr and Other Sailors…
This carefully crafted ebook: "HERMAN MELVILLE Ultimate Collection" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short story writer and a poet. His writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. Novels: Typee Omoo Mardi Redburn White-Jacket Moby-Dick Pierre Israel Potter The Confidence-Man Billy Budd, Sailor Short Stories: The Piazza Bartleby, the Scrivener Benito Cereno The Lightning-Rod Man The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles The Bell-Tower The Apple-Tree Table Jimmy Rose I and My Chimney The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids Cock-a-Doodle-Doo! The Fiddler Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs The Happy Failure The 'Gees The Two Temples Daniel Orme Poetry Collections: Clarel – A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse Weeds and Wildings, With a Rose or Two John Marr and Other Sailors Bridgeroom Dick Tom Deadlight Jack Roy The Haglets The Aeolian Harp To the Master of the "Meteor" Far off Shore The Man-of-War Hawk The Figure-Head The Good Craft "Snow Bird" Old Counsel The Tuft of Kelp The Maldive Shark To Ned Crossing the Tropics The Berg The Enviable Isles Pebbles Poems from Mardi We Fish Invocation Dirge Marlena Pipe Song Song of Yoomy Gold The Land of Love Other Poems Essays: Fragments from a Writing Desk Etchings of a Whaling Cruise Authentic Anecdotes of "Old Zack" Mr. Parkman's Tour Cooper's New Novel A Thought on Book-Binding Hawthorne and His Mosses Criticism: Herman Melville by Virginia Woolf Herman Melville's Moby Dick by D.H. Lawrence Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo by D.H. Lawrence
From its publication in 1846, Typee, Herman Melville's first book, was recognized as a classic of travel and adventure literature. Based on the author's own experiences, as well as oral and written sources, in the South Seas, Melville's story of two runaway sailors held captive by the Typees is a vivid portrait of Polynesian life. Many readers delighted in its racy scenes, but religious fundamentalists saw to it that criticism of missionaries was expurgated from the American text. Five years later, the religious press took revenge on Moby-Dick when Melville again displayed his persistent skepticism and irreverence and celebrated cultural relativity as he had done in Typee. As Melville's fame declined after the 1850s, readers forgot the old religious denunciations and remembered Typee as the best of his books. Throughout his lifetime, Melville's most famous and popular character was Fayaway. This text of Typee is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America). Book jacket.
MOBY DICK BY HERMAN MELVILLE WITH BEAUTIFUL CLASSIC COVER. PERFECTLY FOR EVERYONE WHO LOVES CLASSIC ADVENTURES BOOKS OR AS A GIFT FOR YOU LOVED ONE. GET YOURS TODAY! Specifications: Cover Finish: GLOSSY Dimensions: 5,25" x 8" (13,34 x 20,32 cm) Interior: White Paper Pages: 509
Stung by the critical reception and lack of commercial success of his previous books, Herman Melville became obsessed with the difficulties of communicating his vision to readers. That sense of isolation lies at the heart of these later works. Billy Budd, Sailor is the story of an innocent young man unable to defend himself against a wrongful accusation. The other selections include Bartleby, The Encantadas, Benito Cereno, and The Piazza.
The novel is the fifth book by Melville, first published in London in 1850. The book is based on the author's fourteen months service in the United States Navy, aboard the frigate USS "Neversink" (actually the USS United States).
Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1st, 1819 the third of eight children. At age 7 he contracted scarlet fever which was to permanently diminish his eyesight. By 12 his Father, bankrupted by a failed fur business with the embargo's of the 1812 war with England, died. The family was left penniless. He was briefly able to attend again the Albany Academy from October 1836 to March 1837, where he studied the classics. After a failed stint as a surveyor he signed on to go to sea and travelled across the Atlantic to Liverpool and then on further voyages to the Pacific on adventures which would soon become the architecture of his novels. Whilst travelling he joined a mutiny, was jailed, fell in love with a South Pacific beauty and became known as a figure of opposition to the coercion of native Hawaiians to the Christian religion. He drew from these experiences in his books Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket. These were published as novels, the first initially in London in 1846. They sold very well and enabled him to write full time although royalties were not vast. (During his life it is estimated his writing brought him no more than $10,000) In 1847 he married Elizabeth Shaw and after initially settling in New York they moved to Massachusetts. By 1851 his masterpiece, Moby Dick, was ready and published. It is perhaps, and certainly at the time, one of the most ambitious novels ever written. However it never sold out its initial print run of 3,000 and Melville's earnings on this masterpiece was $556.37. In succeeding years his reputation waned and he found life increasingly difficult. His family was growing, now four children, and a stable income was essential. By 1855 with his writings almost ignored he joined the New York Customs house and worked there for the next 19 years. He published his last book in 1857 to little notice. Despite periods of drinking, depression and other ails Elizabeth stood by her husband despite calls from other family members and the marriage held together. In the 1860's he wrote many poems, many based on the Civil War. But there was no publisher for him and no audience. In 1876 he was at last able to publish privately his 16,000 line epic poem Clare! It was to no avail. By 1885 with his wife's inheritances they were able to retire. Herman Melville, novelist, poet, short story writer and essayist, died at his home on September 28rh 1891. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America. Here we publish his timeless classic Redburn.
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