Herman Melville: A Very Short Introduction

Best known as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville is one of America's greatest writers. His achievements range from popular novels and experimental fiction to powerful poetry. His works are tragic and funny, impassioned and ironic, obsessed with philosophical seeking and attuned to the details of everyday life. Melville engaged the pressing issues of his day, from economic inequality and the American slavery crisis to the rise of science and the fragility of democracy. He dwelled on timeless questions about loneliness and intimacy, moral and political responsibility, the limits of our knowledge and agency, and the place of human beings within nature and the cosmos.

Melville's life was dramatic, and his career improbable. He was born into privilege, fell into poverty as an adolescent, hunted whales and lived with the Tai Pi people of Polynesia, served in the United States Navy, skyrocketed to fame as a novelist, ruined his career by challenging religious, political, sexual, and artistic conventions, reinvented himself as a poet, and died in relative obscurity just as readers began to appreciate his genius. The scope and diversity of Melville's literature reflects an artist of restless ambition. Herman Melville: A Very Short Introduction helps readers explore the richness of his work.

Maurice S. Lee is Professor of English at Boston University. He specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and has written several books on how literature relates to such topics as slavery and philosophy, science and chance, and the information revolution of the nineteenth century. Professor Lee has received awards from the Melville Society, Poe Studies Association, and the Association of College and Research Libraries, as well as fellowships from the NEH, ACLS, and Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University.