Herman Melville's brilliant works remain vital and provocative for their dark ebullience and visionary power. The sweep of his writings- encompassing ferocious social satire, agonized reflection, and formal experimentation-is represented in this comprehen
Between 1849 and 1851, Melville wrote three masterful stories of the sea (including the classic Moby-Dick) that captured colorful and comic glimpses of shipboard life, the excitement of the whale hunt, and seascapes that move from the brutal to the sublim
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 t
