Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd and Other Writings (Library of America College Editions) - Softcover

Melville, Herman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1883011892 ISBN 13: 9781883011895

Publisher: Library of America, 2000

Synopsis

Gathers Melville's best known works of fiction, along with an essay on Hawthorne and twenty-one of his poems, and offers a chronology of his life and information on his works.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Library of America
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1883011892
• ISBN 13: 9781883011895
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 996
• Editor: Tanselle G. Thomas