In place of the sea-centered storylines that dominated his earlier works, Melville's later fiction contains some of his best and many of his most astute and depressing observations of life, not on the high seas but rather at home in America. All of Melville's fiction has now been brought back into print for the first time with the release of this Library of America edition, the third of three volumes.
Published in 1852 (the year after Moby-Dick), Pierre; or, The Ambiguities alternates between the bucolic Berkshire countryside and the horror setting of early New York City. In order to atone for his father's hidden sins, the story's hero, a young American aristocrat, elopes to the city, discovers bohemian culture, tries to write an epic poem, and battles his way through incest, murder, and madness. It has a long history of controversy and is one of Melville's most potent works. It is his sharpest satire of American society and literature.
Pierre, a book that had a significant impact on both Melville's career and American literature, was followed by Israel Potter, which told the tale of a Revolutionary War veteran who had endured a long exile in England and had been the victim of numerous misfortunes. Along the journey, there are unforgettable scenes from battle and intrigue, as well as up-close pictures of George III, John Paul Jones, and Benjamin Franklin. Melville paints a brutal picture of the demise of revolutionary expectations in the exploits of this touchingly idealistic soldier.
The Piazza Tales showcases Melville's impressive command of a variety of literary genres, including "The Encantadas," which explores nature's two faces-enchanting and horrific; "Bartleby the Scrivener," about a Wall Street copyist who "would prefer not to;" and the enigmatic "Benito Cereno," about a credulous Yankee sea captain who stumbles into an intricately planned mutiny aboard a disabled slave ship.
The Confidence-Man, Melville's final book to be published, is a major influence on modernist American literature. It depicts a variety of Americans buying and selling, borrowing and lending, believing and mistrusting as they are hauled toward the auction blocks of New Orleans in a lengthy meditation on faith, hope, and generosity as they are manifested on board a Mississippi riverboat one April Fool's Day.
The "Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack" (burlesque sketches of Zachary Taylor's Mexican campaign), "Fragments from a Writing-Desk," Melville's earliest surviving prose, reviews of Hawthorne, Parkman, and Cooper, and all the stories Melville published in magazines during the 1850s are among the numerous previously uncollected pieces that are also included.
The tragic tale of a lovely, innocent sailor who is forced into navy service, slandered, incited to murder, and sacrificed to military justice is told in the posthumously published masterwork Billy Budd, Sailor. It urges us to reflect on the conflicts that are at the heart of all of Melville's writing: between freedom and fate, innocence and civilization degeneration, while also provoking questions for which there are no answers.
