Herman Melville : Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd (Library of America) [Hardcover]

Herman Melville (Author)

Book Description

Series: Library of America | Publication Date: April 1, 1985

Herman Melville's dark and brilliant late works contain some of his most powerful writing. After "Moby-Dick" he turned from the high seas to record his keen, bleak vision of life at home in America. "Pierre," "Israel Potter," and "The Confidence-Man," satirical dissections of moral breakdown and social hypocrisy, anticipate modernist fiction with their black humor and formal experimentation. With them here are "The Piazza Tales"--including "Bartelby the Scrivener," "The Encantadas," and "Benito Cereno"--and the haunting, posthumously published masterpiece, "Billy Budd, Sailor." Rounding out this third volume of Melville's complete prose in the Library of America are many pieces rarely collected, including magazine stories, comic sketches, and reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Francis Parkman, and James Fenimore Cooper.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Should find a place on every civilized person's bookshelf. -- Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 1478 pages
• Publisher: Library of America (April 1, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0940450240
• ISBN-13: 978-0940450240
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #168,997 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #53 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > 19th Century

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Lonesome Latter Years, May 12, 2001

By 

K. K. Woofter "karwinwalpole" (Montreal, QC Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Herman Melville : Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd (Library of America) (Hardcover)

Darkly humorous, cynical, horrific and melancholy, Melville's later works are the capstone to the author's deepening discontent with his America. The vision here can be frustrating: Melville conjures up the most painful, soul-searching mysteries, and then refuses to knot them up with tidy solutions. Instead, Melville deepens the moral ambiguity that seeped through the skin of the transitional Moby Dick in full-length works like Pierre and Billy Budd, Sailor. And the shorter works--among them The Piazza Tales, Benito Cereno, and Bartleby the Scrivener--are imbued with such a longing for any kind of graspable meaning, that their readers, like their characters, find themselves in a ponderous state of shock. The human condition, Melville seems to say, is one of isolation, cast adrift, searching alone for a truth that is, and always will be, inscrutable.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It ain't all Moby Dick, March 15, 2002

By 

Kimberly Wells (Shreveport, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Herman Melville : Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd (Library of America) (Hardcover)

If you think that you can't read classic American Literature because it's all so big and intimidating (i.e., Moby Dick) think again. Some of the short stories in this collection of Melville's "other" work are incredibly well-written insights into human nature. (As is Moby Dick, but I digress).

Billy Budd's encounter with "justice," Bartleby's statement that he would "prefer not", Benito Cerino's exploration of slavery-- these tales are not to be missed. You should read this book as a starter, then move on to the BIG OLD white whale.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the effort., April 8, 2009

By 

pdj733 - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Herman Melville : Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Tales, Billy Budd (Library of America) (Hardcover)

Nothing I can write can either do justice to this collection or convince you to read it. Those goals are simply out of my persuasive power.

All I can say is that Melville is one of those rare writers who works in the aggregate. He does not hit the nostalgia button like Twain, or compose a jaw-dropping sentence every other paragraph like Dickens. However, after reading much of Melville, a quality of reflection and thought is induced that is equally as valuable, if not superior, to some of his more immediately gratifying contemporaries.

The LA Times stated that this collection "Should find a place on every civilized person's bookshelf." They were spot on.

Combining this collection with Moby-Dick will make you more well-read, it will give you a greater depth to your literary knowledge, but more importantly, it will make you a better human being. And that is worth more than any pretty turn of phrase.