Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd (Library of America) » (1st Edition)

Herman Melville's legend is as mammoth and elusive as the whale that established it. The author's Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale stands as one of literature's greatest epics, a story of mythological proportions that was grounded in real life and a new way of storytelling. Melville's work, underappreciated in its time, remains as much subject to debate and interpretation as it was when he first caught the public eye with his South Seas adventure, Typee, in 1846.

Herman Melville's dark and brilliant late works contain some of his most powerful writing. After Moby-Dick he turned from the high seas to record his keen, bleak vision of life at home in America. Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man, satirical dissections of moral breakdown and social hypocricy, anticipate modernist fiction with their black humor and formal experimentation. With them here are The Piazza Tales - including "Bartleby the Scrivener," "The Encantadas," and "Benito Cereno" - and the haunting posthumous masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor. Rounding out this third volume of Melville's complete prose in The Library of America are many pieces rarely collected, including magazine stories, comic sketches, and reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Francis Parkman, and James Fenimore Cooper.

Herman Melville's dark and brilliant late works contain some of his most powerful writing. After Moby-Dick he turned from the high seas to record his keen, bleak vision of life at home in America. Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man, satirical dissections of moral breakdown and social hypocricy, anticipate modernist fiction with their black humor and formal experimentation. With them here are The Piazza Tales - including "Bartleby the Scrivener," "The Encantadas," and "Benito Cereno" - and the haunting posthumous masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor. Rounding out this third volume of Melville's complete prose in The Library of America are many pieces rarely collected, including magazine stories, comic sketches, and reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Francis Parkman, and James Fenimore Cooper.