Herman Melville

Like a microcosm of America, the Fidele, a Mississippi steamboat bound for New Orleans, floats downstream without reaching its goal, its passengers all the victims or abusers of trust or confidence.

"El capitán Ahab sólo tiene un pensamiento: encontrar a Moby Dick, el gigantesco cachalote que aún persigue sus sueños años después de su primer encuentro. Con este único propósito en mente, navegará con su barco y su tripulación a través de las turbulentas aguas del océano ¡para librar la batalla final! Uno de los clásicos del mundo se reinterpreta en las páginas de este libro, perfectamente adaptado para jóvenes lectores que buscan...

A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fanatical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab's passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul. Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel,...

Long before penning Moby-Dick, which many regard as the quintessential American novel, author Herman Melville was captivated by life on the open sea. White Jacket adopts a different perspective, focusing on the brutal treatment that many sailors received at the hands of their superiors. In particular, it has been noted that this novel proved to be instrumental in banning the practice of flogging in several branches of the U.S. military.

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"A new, definitive edition of Herman Melville's virtuosic short stories--American classics wrought with scorching fury, grim humor, and profound beauty. Though best-known for his epic masterpiece Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also left a body of short stories arguably unmatched in American fiction. In the sorrowful tragedy of Billy Budd, Sailor; the controlled rage of Benito Cereno; and the tantalizing enigma of Bartleby, the Scrivener; Melville reveals...

"Based on the life of an actual soldier who claimed to have fought at Bunker Hill, Israel Potter is unique among Herman Melville's books: It is a novel in the guise of a biography. In telling the story of Israel Potter's fall from Revolutionary War hero to peddler on the streets of London, Melville alternated between invented scenes and historical episodes, granting cameos to such famous men of the era as Benjamin Franklin (Potter may have been his...

An aging lawyer hires a new copyist to help with his firm's workload, and at first he finds himself pleased with his new employee. Bartleby is quiet, efficient and he doesn't display any of the loud eccentricities of the firm's other two copyists, Nippers and Turkey. But one day, when the lawyer asks Bartleby if he will help him compare copies, Bartleby simply replies, "I would prefer not to." As time goes by and Bartleby's strange refusals multiply,...

Featured in this volume are "Billy Budd", Melville's posthumously published novella, the story of the rivalry between a handsome sailor and his demonic captain; the tale of the apathetic "Bartleby, the Scrivener; " the riveting "Benito Cereno", the story of a slave ship mutiny written at the time of the Amistad case and "The Town-Ho's Story", a chapter from Melville's masterpiece, "Moby Dick". Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.

A harrowing tale of slavery and revolt aboard a Spanish ship.

Perhaps Melville's most difficult and wildly textured work, "Pierre, or The Ambiguities", to this day evades easy categorization or critical interpretation. Now seen as an ambitious foray into proto-modernist composition, the text was initially met with utter consternation and was a commercial failure. Published a year after "Moby Dick", this novel tracks the nineteen-year-old Pierre Glendinning through his life in New York City as a fledgling novelist....