Along the way are memorable episodes of war and intrigue, with personal portraits of Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and George III. Long a controversial work, it is Melville’s darkest satire of American life and letters and one of his most powerful books.Ī pivotal work, both for Melville’s career and for American literature, Pierre was followed by Israel Potter, the story of a veteran of the Revolution, victim of a thousand mischances, and a long-suffering exile in England. Its hero, a young American patrician trying to redeem the secret sins of his father, elopes to the city, discovers Bohemian life, attempts a literary epic, and struggles his way through incest, murder, and madness. Pierre or, The Ambiguities, published in 1852 (the year after Moby-Dick), moves between the idyllic Berkshire countryside and the nightmare landscape of early New York City. With the publication of this Library of America volume, the third of three volumes, all Melville’s fiction has now been restored to print for the first time. The Piazza Tales (1856) comprises six short stories, including the perpetually popular “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby,” a tale of a scrivener who repeatedly distills his mordant criticism of the workplace into the deceptively simple phrase “I would prefer not to.Forgoing the narratives of the sea that prevailed in his earlier works, Melville’s later fiction contains some of the finest and many of his keenest and bleakest observations of life, not on the high seas, but at home in America. Although typically ambiguous, Billy Budd is seen by many as a testament to Melville’s ultimate reconciliation with the incongruities and injustices of life. Unable to defend himself due to a stammer, he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. This complex short novel tells the story of “the handsome sailor” Billy who, provoked by a false charge, accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms.

Published posthumously in 1924, Billy Budd is a masterpiece second only to Melville’s Moby-Dick. In Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales, Melville reveals an uncanny awareness of the inscrutable nature of reality. Largely neglected in his own lifetime, Herman Melville mastered not only the great American novel but also the short story and novella forms.

Billy budd and the piazza tales