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(0)Herman Melville
Billy Budd, Sailor would emerge, after its publication in 1924, as one of Melville's best-loved books—and one of his most open, with its discussion of homosexualty.
In it, Melville returns to the sea to tell the story of Billy, a cheerful, hard working, and handsome young sailor, conscripted to work against his will on another ship, where he soon finds...
When approached at sea by the slaver San Dominick, Captain Amasa Delano of the Bachelor's Delight is struck by the Spanish ship's dilapidated condition, her peculiar captain—Benito Cereno—and the strange atmosphere among the white crew and black slaves. While Delano accepts Cereno's explanation of trying times aboard the Dominick, including the death of the slave master, Delano's doubt persists, and the answers to his questions come
...7) The Piazza
Herman Melville's tale of corporate discontent, Bartleby, the Scrivener, tells the story of a quiet, hardworking legal copyist who works in an office in the Wall Street area of New York City. The business where he works handles the official financial paperwork of wealthy men. One day, Bartleby's employer requests he proofread one of the documents he has copied. Bartleby declines the assignment with the inscrutable "I would prefer not," the first
...Pierre Glendinning is the nineteen-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel, Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his father's
...In his ninth and final novel, cultural observer, novelist, and poet Herman Melville gives us a picture of everything wrong with America in the decade preceding the Civil War.
Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. Aboard the Fidèle can be found all manner of con man, from those selling stock in failing
...13) Benito Cereno
With its intense mix of mystery, adventure, and a surprise ending, Benito Cereno at first seems merely a provocative example from the genre Herman Melville created with his early bestselling novels of the sea. However, most Melville scholars consider it his most sophisticated work, and many, such as novelist Ralph Ellison, have hailed it as the most piercing look at slavery in all of American literature.
Based on a real life incident—the
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