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Best known as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville is one of America's greatest writers. His achievements range from popular novels and experimental fiction to powerful poetry. His works are tragic and funny, impassioned and ironic, obsessed with philosophical seeking and attuned to the details of everyday life. Melville engaged the pressing issues of his day, from economic inequality and the American slavery crisis to the rise of science and the fragility of democracy. He dwelled on timeless questions about loneliness and intimacy, moral and political responsibility, the limits of our knowledge and agency, and the place of human beings within nature and the cosmos.
Melville's life was dramatic, and his career improbable. He was born into privilege, fell into poverty as an adolescent, hunted whales and lived with the Tai Pi people of Polynesia, served in the United States Navy, skyrocketed to fame as a novelist, ruined his career by challenging religious, political, sexual, and artistic conventions, reinvented himself as a poet, and died in relative obscurity just as readers began to appreciate his genius. The scope and diversity of Melville's literature reflects an artist of restless ambition. Herman Melville: A Very Short Introduction helps readers explore the richness of his work.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1
A Brief Biography
Chapter 2
Truth, Sex, and Empire: The Pacific Island Novels
Chapter 3
A Moving World: Redburn and White-Jacket
Chapter 4
Four Reasons for Going to Sea in Moby-Dick
Chapter 5
Antagonisms: Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man
Chapter 6:
Melville's Magazine Fiction
Chapter 7
Pushed and Pulled to Poetry
A Ragged Conclusion: Billy Budd
References
Further Reading
Index
Description
Best known as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville is one of America's greatest writers. His achievements range from popular novels and experimental fiction to powerful poetry. His works are tragic and funny, impassioned and ironic, obsessed with philosophical seeking and attuned to the details of everyday life. Melville engaged the pressing issues of his day, from economic inequality and the American slavery crisis to the rise of science and the fragility of democracy. He dwelled on timeless questions about loneliness and intimacy, moral and political responsibility, the limits of our knowledge and agency, and the place of human beings within nature and the cosmos.
Melville's life was dramatic, and his career improbable. He was born into privilege, fell into poverty as an adolescent, hunted whales and lived with the Tai Pi people of Polynesia, served in the United States Navy, skyrocketed to fame as a novelist, ruined his career by challenging religious, political, sexual, and artistic conventions, reinvented himself as a poet, and died in relative obscurity just as readers began to appreciate his genius. The scope and diversity of Melville's literature reflects an artist of restless ambition. Herman Melville: A Very Short Introduction helps readers explore the richness of his work.
