Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd and Other Writings (Library of America College Editions) [Paperback]

Herman Melville (Author), G. Thomas Tanselle (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Library of America College Editions | Publication Date: August 1, 2000

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 comprehensive edition. Here are Melville's masterpieces: Moby-Dick in its entirety; Billy Budd; "Bartleby, The Scrivener"; "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles"; the essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses"; and 21 poems, including "The House-top," an anguished response to the New York draft riots.

Editorial Reviews

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
  
• Paperback: 996 pages
• Publisher: Library of America (August 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883011892
• ISBN-13: 978-1883011895
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #221,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars best one-volume melville?, December 22, 2001

By 

jota (College Park, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd and Other Writings (Library of America College Editions) (Paperback)

After a lot of browsing among different editions of Melville's works, I chose this one because it was attractive and cheap and contained all of his acknowledged masterpieces. Getting "Moby-Dick," "Billy Budd," and his greatest short stories and poems in one well-made volume, for ($$$) bucks, is indeed a pretty good deal. I wish Library of America would start commissioning some scholarly introductions for their books, though. Their volumes seem to be geared towards intelligent people who are not necessarily experts in a particular field, and it would be useful to provide an introduction that places the works in context and gives a brief idea of the latest scholarship.

There is a "Note on the Texts" here, which is really of interest only to specialists, and a chronology of Melville's life, and some rather random and cursory endnotes: there are only a few pages' worth for "Moby-Dick," for example, which could be annotated much more extensively (and I'm sure it has been). It's unclear why the editors choose to explain some of Melville's allusions but not others. So if you're looking for a well-annotated "Moby-Dick," look elsewhere.

As for the works themselves, there's little I could say about them that hasn't been said a thousand times before. Every one of Melville's lines crackle with dark intensity; his writing is relentless, wild, eccentric, sometimes out of control, but even then it's a pleasure to follow him on his fiery way. His is a kind of uniquely American tragic sense, the dark flip side of Emerson and Whitman's democratic individualism. Ahab, and Bartleby, are supreme individualists, but their uncompromised visions lead to doom rather than liberation.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good introduction to Melville's works, July 28, 2005

By 

Luis Antonio Giron "Luis Antonio Giron" (São Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd and Other Writings (Library of America College Editions) (Paperback)

Although this book should not be called a complete volume, it is rather a collection of Melville's writings, it provides a enjoyable and interesting introduction to one of the most impressive american writers of the 19th century. It contains a real classic - the novel Moby Dick - and some novellas from The Piazza Tales, such as "Bartleby, The Scrivener" (in my opinion, Melville's masterpiece), "Benito Cereno" and "Billy Budd, the Saylor". There is at least a big surprise inside: the essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses", a text from the youth, but full of insights about Melville's friend, Nathanael Hawthorne. A fantastic gift, like most of Library of America editions.

0 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars not so great, August 1, 2009

By 

Caraculiambro (La Mancha and environs) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd and Other Writings (Library of America College Editions) (Paperback)

This is a handsome, slightly oversized edition. Here are the contents:

1. Moby-Dick, unabridged.
2. Bartleby, The Scrivener
3. Benito Cereno
4. The Encantadas
5. Billy Budd
6. Hawthorne and His Mosses
7. Selected Poems
The Portent
The Temeraire
A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Flight
Shiloh: A Requiem
The House-top: A Night Piece
The Swamp Angel
The Apparition
America
A Requiem: for Soldiers Lost in Ocean Transports
Tom Deadlight
The Tuft of Kelp
The Maldive Shark
To Ned
The Berg
Timoleon
After the Pleasure Party
Monody
The Bench of Boors
Art
In a Church of Padua
Pontoosuce

The problem with this edition, in my view, are the footnotes. There are footnotes, so on the one hand I shouldn't be complaining, since finding annotated editions of "Billy Budd" and "The Encantadas" is difficult. On the other hand, the footnotes are all of the "go get it yourself" kind. For example, when Melville writes, "send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger," the footnotes -- the incidence of which is not marked in the running text -- merely says "Luke 16:24". In other words, you've got to look it up yourself. So I would characterize the footnotes as sparse and taciturn: they'll clue you in to the source, but as for the exact wording of something and its accumulated historical connotations, you've got to come up with those yourself.