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127-458: Melville had originally intended to entitle the volume Benito Cereno and Other Sketches , but settled on the definitive title after he had written the introductory story. The book received largely favorable reviews, with reviewers especially praising "The Encantadas" but did not sell well enough to get Melville out of his financial straits, probably because short fiction for magazines had little appeal to bookbuyers. From after Melville's rediscovery to

254-477: A certain wild and ghostly power; but the exaggeration of their teller's manner appears to be on the increase." Also taking the stories together, the United States Democratic Review for September 1856 wrote that "All of them exhibit that peculiar richness of language, descriptive vitality, and splendidly sombre imagination which are the author's characteristics." Praise for Melville's charming style

381-558: A comical " prose poem " that blends "high and low with a relaxed assurance". Similar passages include the "marvelous hymn to spiritual democracy" in the middle of "Knights and Squires". The elaborate use of the Homeric simile may not have been learned from Homer himself, yet Matthiessen finds the writing "more consistently alive" on the Homeric than on the Shakespearean level, especially during

508-415: A few handfuls. Days later, Pip , a little African American cabin-boy, jumps in panic from Stubb's whale boat and the whale must be cut loose because Pip is entangled in the line; a few days later Pip again jumps in panic, is left alone in the sea, and has gone insane by the time he is picked up. Cooled spermaceti congeals and must be squeezed back into liquid state; blubber is boiled in the try-pots on deck;

635-460: A force of linearity and Ishmael a force of digression. While both have an angry sense of being orphaned, they try to come to terms with this hole in their beings in different ways: Ahab with violence, Ishmael with meditation. And while the plot in Moby-Dick may be driven by Ahab's anger, Ishmael's desire to get a hold of the "ungraspable" accounts for the novel's lyricism. Buell sees a double quest in

762-410: A friend that Burton was a "blackguard and a villain." Poe's friend Joseph E. Snodgrass thought Burton's rumour-mongering was enough for Poe to sue for slander but Poe noted his own name-calling was enough for a countersuit. In late 1840, Burton sold his magazine to George Rex Graham for the price of $ 3,500 (one dollar for each subscriber), who transformed it into Graham's Magazine . Burton used

889-509: A general nature and cannot be identified to single works, or as Sealts puts it, Melville "not infrequently followed the lead of others in terms of plotting, characterization, and technique of narration." As Sealts demonstrates, all of these elements are present in "Bartleby". Melville's knowledge of the Wall Street location is first-hand because his brother Allan was a Wall Street lawyer, the story contains knowing references to current events, and

1016-519: A grand, ungodly, god-like man" who nevertheless "has his humanities". They hire Queequeg the following morning. A man named Elijah prophesies a dire fate should Ishmael and Queequeg join Ahab. While provisions are loaded, shadowy figures board the ship. On a cold Christmas Day, the Pequod leaves the harbor. Ishmael discusses cetology (the zoological classification and natural history of the whale), and describes

1143-430: A hidden text" has proven to be persuasieve. Writing in the twenty-first century, Bryant makes essentially the same point when he notes that "carefully modulated ironies" are put to such use that "the brightness of sentiment and geniality would be made to reveal its darker edges: deception, sexuality, alienation, and poverty." For Robert Milder, in the best of the short stories these different levels of meaning are fused "in

1270-443: A leading scholar on Melville's short fiction, notes that in "Bartleby" knowing references to current events occur, and says that the supporting characters of Turkey, Nippers, and the errand boy Ginger Nut "could easily have come from the pen of Dickens, Lamb, or Irving." The basis for the longest story in the collection, the novella-length "Benito Cereno", is chapter 18 of Amasa Delano 's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels . The story

1397-427: A literary critic himself for the magazine. To remain competitive, the magazine included better paper, more illustrations , and higher-quality printing, making production costs high. Poe became an editor in 1839, though Burton disliked Poe's harsh style of criticism. Even so, Poe's responsibilities increased whenever Burton left town to perform at other venues. It was under Burton that Poe began what has since been termed

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1524-512: A masque of the situation confronting man, a pageant of the humors within men, a parade of the nations, and so forth, as well as concrete and symbolic ways of thinking about the White Whale". Scholar Nathalia Wright sees the meetings and the significance of the vessels along other lines. She singles out the four vessels which have already encountered Moby Dick. The first, the Jeroboam , is named after

1651-451: A metrical pattern, the rhythms are "evenly controlled—too evenly perhaps for prose", Bezanson suggests. A third level is the idiomatic , and just as the poetic it hardly is present in pure form. Examples of this are "the consistently excellent idiom" of Stubb, such as in the way he encourages the rowing crew in a rhythm of speech that suggests "the beat of the oars takes the place of the metronomic meter". The fourth and final level of rhetoric

1778-401: A mysterious spell on Ishmael: "Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine". Instead of rounding Cape Horn , Ahab heads for the equatorial Pacific Ocean via southern Africa. One afternoon, as Ishmael and Queequeg are weaving a mat—"its warp seemed necessity, his hand free will, and Queequeg's sword chance"— Tashtego sights a sperm whale . Five previously unknown men appear on deck and are revealed to be

1905-628: A paragraph in English to save his life". Poe was fired by Burton in June 1840. Burton and Poe had a tumultuous working relationship. Burton tried selling the magazine without telling Poe, and Poe made plans to launch his own competing Philadelphia-based magazine called The Penn without mentioning it to Burton. Additionally, Burton may have written a particularly scathing negative review of Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and spread rumours of his drunkenness, which Poe denied. Poe told

2032-440: A play from his pen, called Ellen Wareham , was first presented, and it is mentioned that this piece had the somewhat unusual fortune of being acted at five different theatres of London on the same evening. Burton went on to a large number of plays during his career. On 10 April 1823 Burton had married Elizabeth Loft, by whom in 1824 he had a son . The marriage was not a success, and partly due to this in 1834 Burton relocated to

2159-427: A resident of Nantucket. When Ahab finally appears on the quarterdeck , he announces he is out for revenge on the white whale which took one leg from the knee down and left him with a prosthesis fashioned from a whale's jawbone. Ahab will give the first man to sight Moby Dick a doubloon , a gold coin, which he nails to the mast. Starbuck objects that he has not come for vengeance but for profit. Ahab's purpose exercises

2286-512: A spare seachest, which is later caulked and pitched to replace the Pequod ' s life buoy. The Pequod sails northeast toward Formosa and into the Pacific Ocean. Ahab, with one nostril, smells the musk from the Bashee isles, and with the other, the salt of the waters where Moby Dick swims. Ahab goes to Perth, the blacksmith, with a bag of racehorse shoenail stubs to be forged into the shank of

2413-543: A special crew selected by Ahab and explain the shadowy figures seen boarding the ship. Their leader, Fedallah , a Parsee , is Ahab's harpooneer. The pursuit is unsuccessful. Southeast of the Cape of Good Hope , the Pequod makes the first of nine sea-encounters, or " gams ", with other ships: Ahab hails the Goney (Albatross) to ask whether they have seen the White Whale, but the trumpet through which her captain tries to speak falls into

2540-558: A special harpoon, and with his razors for Perth to melt and fashion into a harpoon barb. Ahab tempers the barb in blood from Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo. The Pequod gams next with the Bachelor , a Nantucket ship heading home full of sperm oil. Every now and then, the Pequod lowers for whales with success. On one of those nights in the whaleboat, Fedallah prophesies that neither hearse nor coffin can be Ahab's, that before he dies, Ahab must see two hearses — one not made by mortal hands and

2667-453: A speech on the spirit of fire, seeing the lightning as a portent of Moby Dick. Starbuck sees the lightning as a warning, and feels tempted to shoot the sleeping Ahab with a musket. The next morning, when he finds that the lightning disoriented the compass, Ahab makes a new one out of a lance, a maul, and a sailmaker's needle. He orders the log be heaved, but the weathered line snaps, leaving the ship with no way to fix its location. The Pequod

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2794-483: A throne", and "my fingers ... began ... to serpentine and spiralize ". For Arvin, the essence of the writing style of Moby-Dick lies in the manner in which the parts of speech are 'intermixingly' assorted in Melville's style—so that the distinction between verbs and nouns, substantives and modifiers, becomes a half unreal one—this is the prime characteristic of his language. No feature of it could express more tellingly

2921-517: A vision of tragedy more poignant than Moby-Dick's or Pierre's because it is more keenly responsive to the lived human condition." The collection met with short, cursory reviews only, which Branch attributes to the "general attitude" that the "author of Typee should do something higher and better than Magazine articles," as the New York Times wrote. "The Encantadas" attracted the most attention, probably, Branch suggests, because it reminded reviewers of

3048-513: A whaling voyage. The inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with the tattooed cannibal Polynesian Queequeg , a harpooneer whose father was king of the fictional island of Rokovoko . The next morning, Ishmael and Queequeg attend Father Mapple 's sermon on Jonah , then head for Nantucket . Ishmael signs up with the Quaker ship-owners Bildad and Peleg for a voyage on their whaler Pequod . Peleg describes Captain Ahab : "He's

3175-432: A yardarm opposite the sperm whale's head. Ishmael compares the two heads in a philosophical way: the right whale is Lockean , stoic , and the sperm whale is Kantean , platonic . Tashtego cuts into the head of the sperm whale and retrieves buckets of spermaceti . He falls into the head, which in turn falls off the yardarm into the sea. Queequeg dives after him and frees his mate with his sword. The Pequod next gams with

3302-487: Is "a matter of shaping what exists by the way in which we see it". The point is not that Ahab would discover the whale as an object, but that he would perceive it as a symbol of his making. Yet Melville does not offer easy solutions. Ishmael and Queequeg's sensual friendship initiates a kind of racial harmony that is shattered when the crew's dancing erupts into racial conflict in "Midnight, Forecastle" (Ch. 40). Fifty chapters later, Pip suffers mental disintegration after he

3429-479: Is "not so reliable", Bryant finds, but the third-person narrator of "Benito Cereno" represents a "less conspicuous form of unreliability" and precisely because this third-person position seems objective, while in reality Delano's distorted point of view is adhered to. In line with other writers of short stories of the time like Poe, Melville's narrative structures stimulate readers to look beyond their initial readings to understand more. This view of "the stories to have

3556-630: Is Melville's own Pittsfield piazza, critic F. O. Matthiessen suggests that the piece must have been suggested by Hawthorne's manse. Sealts regards both Arrowhead, the Pittsfield farm where Melville then lived, and nearby Mount Greylock as inspiring the setting for the story and, like Matthiessen, suggests that Melville was influenced by Hawthorne's method of preparing the reader for the stories in Mosses from an Old Manse through an account of his old manse at Concord. For Warner Berthoff, Melville's short works of

3683-451: Is among world literature's most famous. Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850 and finished 18 months later, a year after he had anticipated. Melville drew on his experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844, including on whalers, and on wide reading in whaling literature. The white whale is modeled on a notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale Mocha Dick , and the book's ending

3810-412: Is based on the sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820. The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil , as well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class and social status , good and evil, and the existence of God . The book's literary influences include Shakespeare , Thomas Carlyle , Sir Thomas Browne and

3937-469: Is based upon an incident occurring in the Berkshires in the fall of 1853, an invasion of salesmen of lightning rods . Sealts considers "The Bell-Tower" to be "the least characteristic of Melville's stories," somewhat resembling Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe 's work. It is a dark story about an eccentric Italian artist and architect who designs a bell tower and bell. As a magazine writer, Melville

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4064-471: Is centered on the sailor Ishmael 's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab , captain of the whaling ship Pequod , for vengeance against Moby Dick , the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance , Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of

4191-623: Is dedicated to Hawthorne, "in token of my admiration for his genius". The book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale , in a single-volume edition in New York in November. The London publisher, Richard Bentley , censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change of

4318-575: Is now heading southeast toward Moby Dick. A man falls overboard from the mast. The life buoy is thrown, but both sink. Queequeg now proposes that his superfluous coffin be used as a new life buoy. Starbuck orders the carpenter to seal and waterproof it. The next morning, the ship meets in another truncated gam with the Rachel , commanded by Captain Gardiner from Nantucket. The Rachel is seeking survivors from one of her whaleboats which had gone after Moby Dick. Among

4445-419: Is reminded that as a slave he would be worth less money than a whale. Commodified and brutalized, "Pip becomes the ship's conscience". His views of property are another example of wrestling with moral choice. In Chapter 89, " Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish , Ishmael expounds the legal concept "fast-fish and loose-fish", which gives right of ownership to those who take possession of an abandoned fish or ship; he compares

4572-432: Is revealed, but only to the crew: a defiant sailor who struck an oppressive officer is flogged, and when that officer led the chase for Moby Dick, he fell from the boat and was killed by the whale. Ishmael digresses on pictures of whales, brit (microscopic sea creatures on which whales feed), squid and—after four boats are lowered in vain because Daggoo mistook a giant squid for the white whale—whale-lines. The next day, in

4699-648: Is set in 1799 off the coast of Chile, where the Massachusetts captain of merchant ship Bachelor's Delight , Amasa Delano, sees the Spanish slaveship San Dominick in apparent distress. He boards the ship and offers captain Don Benito Cereno his help. Throughout his visit, Cereno is accompanied by the servant Babo, and Delano is witness to the famous shaving scene in the story, in which barber Babo slightly cuts his master. Only at Delano's departure does it become clear that

4826-507: Is the composite , "a magnificent blending" of the first three and possible other elements: The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on

4953-448: Is the series of nine meetings between the Pequod and other ships. These meetings are important in three ways. First, their placement in the narrative: the initial two meetings and the last two are both close to each other. The central group of five gams are separated by about 12 chapters. This pattern provides a structural element, remarks Bezanson, as if the encounters were "bones to the book's flesh". Second, Ahab's developing responses to

5080-574: The Gentlemen's Magazine , of which Edgar Allan Poe was for some time the editor. His magazine was intended for a general audience, incorporating the standard fare of poetry and fiction, but had a focus on sporting life like hunting and sailing. For the September 1837 issue Burton wrote an early example of the detective story , 'The Secret Cell', detailing a London policeman's efforts to trace an abducted girl and arrest her kidnappers. Burton likely served as

5207-531: The Bible . In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions , soliloquies , and asides . In August 1850, with the manuscript perhaps half finished, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne and was deeply impressed by his Mosses from an Old Manse , which he compared to Shakespeare in its cosmic ambitions. This encounter may have inspired him to revise and deepen Moby-Dick , which

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5334-473: The Indian Ocean , Stubb kills a sperm whale, and that night Fleece, the Pequod ' s black cook, prepares him a rare whale steak. Fleece, at Stubb's request, delivers a sermon to the sharks that fight each other to feast on the whale's carcass, tied to the ship, saying that their nature is to be voracious, but they must overcome it. The whale is prepared, beheaded, and barrels of oil are tried out. Standing at

5461-612: The Jungfrau from Bremen. Both ships sight whales simultaneously, with the Pequod winning the contest. The three harpooneers dart their harpoons, and Flask delivers the mortal strike with a lance. The carcass sinks, and Queequeg barely manages to escape. The Pequod ' s next gam is with the French whaler Bouton de Rose , whose crew is ignorant of the ambergris in the gut of the diseased whale in their possession. Stubb talks them out of it, but Ahab orders him away before he can recover more than

5588-560: The Pequod ' s own fate. Second, the increasingly impressive encounters with whales. In the early encounters, the whaleboats hardly make contact; later there are false alarms and routine chases; finally, the massive assembling of whales at the edges of the China Sea in "The Grand Armada". A typhoon near Japan sets the stage for Ahab's confrontation with Moby Dick. The third pattern is the cetological documentation, so lavish that it can be divided into two subpatterns. These chapters start with

5715-438: The "Longfellow War", with Poe using his role as critic to anonymously accuse the popular poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. Another critic, Willis Gaylord Clark , blamed Burton for allowing these literary attacks, telling Longfellow that Burton was: "a vagrant from England, who has left a wife and offspring behind him there, and plays the bigamist in this with another wife, and his whore besides; one who cannot write

5842-588: The "[masquerade in kingly weeds of] a wild egoism, anarchic, irresponsible, and destructive". "Above all", say the scholars Bryant and Springer, Moby-Dick is language: "nautical, biblical , Homeric , Shakespearean , Miltonic , cetological , alliterative , fanciful, colloquial , archaic and unceasingly allusive ". Melville stretches grammar, quotes well-known or obscure sources, or swings from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or wild prophetic archaism. Melville coined words, critic Newton Arvin recognizes, as if

5969-638: The 1920s onward. Sealts also found that interpretations of the short stories have, over time, shifted their focus from metaphysical to epistemological concerns and from general ethical considerations to "more immediate political and social implications," such as reading "Benito Cereno" in the context of the heated debate over slavery leading up to the Civil War. Many scholarly studies have looked at how Melville drew inspiration from: his own observation of contemporary life, his knowledge of literature, and his familiarity with more specialized sources, including travelogues of

6096-556: The American proofs in 1852, which Melville could not accept. Pierre found no British publisher and hence Melville received no advance payment in the summer of 1852. The reviews for Pierre were harsh, and this damaged Melville's reputation the more because the reviews followed upon the mixed reception of the whaling novel. In the spring of 1853 Melville could not get his next work printed, most likely, Sealts thinks, because Harper "simply refused to bring out another work by Herman Melville in

6223-424: The Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. The novel uses several levels of rhetoric. The simplest is "a relatively straightforward expository style", such as in the cetological chapters, though they are "rarely sustained, and serve chiefly as transitions" between more sophisticated levels. A second level is the " poetic ", such as in Ahab's quarterdeck monologue, to the point that it can be set as blank verse . Set over

6350-465: The English vocabulary were too limited for the complex things he had to express. Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as allurings , coincidings , and leewardings . Equally abundant are unfamiliar adjectives and adverbs, including participial adjectives such as officered , omnitooled , and uncatastrophied ; participial adverbs such as intermixingly , postponedly , and uninterpenetratingly ; rarities such as

6477-636: The Galapagos Islands, supplemented with material from his reading in at least six books of Pacific voyages, including The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin . A month after the collection was published, Melville's old friend Richard Tobias Greene, on whom Toby in Typee was based, wrote him a letter expressing how the Encantadas sketches "had called up reminiscences of days gone by". Assuming that "The Piazza"

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6604-537: The Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him" ( I Kings 16:33). An early enthusiast for the Melville Revival, British author E. M. Forster remarked in 1927: " Moby-Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem." Yet he saw as "the essential" in the book "its prophetic song", which flows "like an undercurrent" beneath the surface action and morality. The hunt for

6731-533: The Pacific and articles in periodicals. Scholar Robert Milder recognized a new development in Melville's writing: prompted by the compromise that writing stories for magazines inevitably entails, Melville now "mastered the art of covert insinuation, managing his ironic or unreliable narrators with such subtlety that readers still dispute which (if any) of the narrators voice his own opinions and which are objects of satire or detached psychological interest." Milder describes

6858-869: The United States, where he appeared in Philadelphia as Dr. Ollapod in The Poor Gentleman . He took a prominent place, both as actor and manager, in New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore , the theatre which he leased in New York being renamed Burton's Theatre . He was very successful as Captain Cuttle in John Brougham 's dramatisation of Dombey and Son , and in other low comedy parts in plays from Charles Dickens 's novels. In 1837 in Philadelphia he established

6985-465: The World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery, in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands . After surveying scholarship and criticism on the tales up to the 1980s, Sealts observed that, of the six Piazza Tales , "Benito Cereno" and "The Encantadas" have attracted the most attention from the beginning of Melville studies, while "Bartleby" and "The Piazza" increasingly captured scholarly attention from

7112-451: The adjectives unsmoothable , spermy , and leviathanic , and adverbs such as sultanically , Spanishly , and Venetianly ; and adjectival compounds ranging from odd to magnificent, such as "the message-carrying air", "the circus-running sun", and " teeth-tiered sharks". It is rarer for Melville to create his own verbs from nouns, but he does this with what Arvin calls "irresistible effect", such as in "who didst thunder him higher than

7239-496: The ancient history of whaling and a bibliographical classification of whales, getting closer with second-hand stories of the evil of whales in general and of Moby Dick in particular, a chronologically ordered commentary on pictures of whales. The climax to this section is chapter 57, "Of whales in paint etc.", which begins with the humble (a beggar in London) and ends with the sublime (the constellation Cetus). The next chapter ("Brit"), thus

7366-414: The author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence , "Call me Ishmael",

7493-524: The author's first two books, listed on the title page. The first review appeared in the New York Atlas for 25 May, followed by more than thirty others until as late as September. Only two of the thirty-three reviews and notices critic Johannes D. Bergmann read "seem seriously negative." Most of the others were full of praise, especially for "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno," and "The Encantadas." Several reviewers singling out "Bartleby" and "The Bell-Tower" compare

7620-399: The awareness that lies below and behind Moby-Dick —the awareness that action and condition, movement and stasis, object and idea, are but surface aspects of one underlying reality. Later critics have expanded Arvin's categories. The superabundant vocabulary can be broken down into strategies used individually and in combination. First, the original modification of words as "Leviathanism" and

7747-600: The basis for many characters in the short fiction, as some of the reviewers guessed. Never an excelling inventor of original plots, Melville elaborated on his own experiences with material from his reading. Chief among the influences upon his magazine fiction, as recognized by both contemporary reviewers of The Piazza Tales and Melville scholars of the following century, were tales and sketches by such contemporary authors as Washington Irving , Edgar Allan Poe , Nathaniel Hawthorne , Charles Lamb and Charles Dickens , some of whom he had read as early as 1849. These are influences of

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7874-416: The bipolar observer/hero narrative", that is, the novel is structured around the two main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, who are intertwined and contrasted with each other, with Ishmael the observer and narrator. As the story of Ishmael, remarks Robert Milder, it is a "narrative of education". Bryant and Springer find that the book is structured around the two consciousnesses of Ahab and Ishmael, with Ahab as

8001-409: The book, are developed enough to be called "events". As Bezanson writes, "in each case a killing provokes either a chapter sequence or a chapter cluster of cetological lore growing out of the circumstance of the particular killing," thus these killings are "structural occasions for ordering the whaling essays and sermons". Buell observes that the "narrative architecture" is an "idiosyncratic variant of

8128-430: The book, under a variety of titles, appeared until 1898, making "The Lightning-Rod Man" the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime. In "The Piazza", specially written as an introductory story to the volume, the protagonist idealizes a radiant spot on the mountain he looks upon from his piazza. This spot is a house and one day he goes to the cottage, only to find the unhappy girl Marianna, who longs to see

8255-418: The book: Ahab's is to hunt Moby Dick, Ishmael's is "to understand what to make of both whale and hunt". One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres. Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travel account, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry. He calls Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary genre "a Nabokovian touch". A significant structural device

8382-412: The chapter structure can be divided into "chapter sequences", "chapter clusters", and "balancing chapters". The simplest sequences are of narrative progression, then sequences of theme such as the three chapters on whale painting, and sequences of structural similarity, such as the five dramatic chapters beginning with "The Quarter-Deck" or the four chapters beginning with "The Candles". Chapter clusters are

8509-500: The chapters on the significance of the color white, and those on the meaning of fire. Balancing chapters are chapters of opposites, such as "Loomings" versus the "Epilogue", or similars, such as "The Quarter-Deck" and "The Candles". Scholar Lawrence Buell describes the arrangement of the non-narrative chapters as structured around three patterns: first, the nine meetings of the Pequod with ships that have encountered Moby Dick. Each has been more and more severely damaged, foreshadowing

8636-456: The coin in a way shaped by his own personality. Later, the American edition has Ahab "discover no sign" (Ch. 133) of the whale when he is staring into the deep. In fact, Moby Dick is then swimming up at him. In the British edition, Melville changed the word "discover" to "perceive", and with good reason, for "discovery" means finding what is already there, but "perceiving", or better still, perception,

8763-779: The concept to events in history, such as the European colonization of the Americas , the partitions of Poland , and the Mexican–American War . The novel has also been read as critical of the contemporary literary and philosophical movement Transcendentalism , attacking the thought of leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. The life and death of Ahab has been read as an attack on Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance , for one, in its destructive potential and potential justification for egoism . Richard Chase writes that for Melville, "Death—spiritual, emotional, physical—is

8890-546: The contemporary reviews were unsigned, and not all singled out any individual story, but merely described the collection as a whole. On 9 July 1856, the Springfield Republican compared the collection to Hawthorne's best work, "marked by a delicate fancy, a bright and most fruitful imagination, a pure and translucent style and a certain weirdness of conceit." "The legends themselves," wrote the Athenaeum for 26 July, "have

9017-400: The crew members of the Pequod . Although Ishmael initially is afraid of Queequeg as a tattooed possible cannibal, he soon decides that he would "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." While it may be rare for a mid-19th century American book to feature Black characters in a nonslavery context, slavery is frequently mentioned. The theme of race is carried primarily by Pip,

9144-412: The crew members. The chief mate is 30-year-old Starbuck , a Nantucket Quaker with a realist mentality, whose harpooneer is Queequeg; second mate is Stubb , from Cape Cod , happy-go-lucky and cheerful, whose harpooneer is Tashtego , a proud, pure-blooded Indian from Gay Head ; and the third mate is Flask , also from Martha's Vineyard , short, stout, whose harpooneer is Daggoo , a tall African, now

9271-420: The deck and stands near Fedallah. On the first day of the chase, Ahab smells the whale, climbs the mast, and sights Moby Dick. He claims the doubloon for himself, and orders all boats to lower except for Starbuck's. The whale bites Ahab's boat in two, tosses the captain out of it, and scatters the crew. On the second day of the chase, Ahab leaves Starbuck in charge of the Pequod . Moby Dick smashes into splinters

9398-468: The destroyed ship is the hearse made of American wood in Fedallah's prophecy. Moby Dick returns "within a few yards of Ahab's boat", a harpoon is darted, the line gets tangled, and Ahab stoops to free it. In doing so, the line loops around Ahab's neck. As the mortally stricken whale swims away, the captain is drawn with him out of sight. Queequeg's coffin comes to the surface, and it is the only thing to escape

9525-508: The determination to pay authors a handsome sum. For three years the magazine was successful, in Miller's estimation because of the brilliance of both the articles and of the editing—primarily by Briggs, who understood that "'A man buys a Magazine to be amused'". Melville received the February issue, which carried a summary of Melville's career in the shape of an essay by Fitz-James O'Brien, a young Irish immigrant. According to Parker, this publication

9652-471: The diminutive Black cabin boy. When Pip has almost drowned, and Ahab, genuinely touched by Pip's suffering, questions him gently, Pip "can only parrot the language of an advertisement for the return of a fugitive slave: 'Pip! Reward for Pip!'". Editors Bryant and Springer suggest that perception is a central theme—the difficulty of seeing and understanding, which makes deep reality hard to discover and truth hard to pin down. Ahab explains that, like all things,

9779-419: The dramatic names of Robert William Elliston and Charles Mathews . At the age of 18, in consequence of the death of his father, the youth was called to take charge of the printing office, and also to be the support of a widowed mother. His first effort was to establish a monthly magazine. The attempt was a failure, but it brought him theatrical acquaintances, and under their influence he presently drifted toward

9906-526: The earlier style of Burton was in a measure founded. In 1832 Burton obtained a chance to show his talents at the Haymarket Theatre —Liston having temporarily withdrawn—and there he played Marall to Edmund Kean as Sir Giles Overreach, and Mrs. Glover as Meg in A New Way to Pay Old Debts , a circumstance which he always remembered, and often mentioned with pride and pleasure. His talents as a writer likewise displayed themselves at an early age. In May 1833,

10033-432: The end of the twentieth century, the short works that attracted the most critical attention were "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno" and "The Encantadas," with "The Piazza" a little behind those. After reviewers denigrated Moby-Dick in 1851, Harper brothers changed the terms for its successor, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities . Melville's London publisher Richard Bentley would not publish Pierre without alterations after he saw

10160-402: The evil whale wears a disguise: "All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks"—and Ahab is determined to "strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside, except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall" (Ch. 36, "The Quarter-Deck"). This theme pervades the novel, perhaps never so emphatically as in "The Doubloon" (Ch. 99), where each crewmember perceives

10287-506: The exaggerated repetition of modified words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied" and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin"). Second, the use of existing words in new ways, as when the whale "heaps" and "tasks". Third, words lifted from specialized fields, as "fossiliferous". Fourth, the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires"). Fifth, using

10414-463: The fancy that nature had intended him to be a tragedian . Burton was one of the funniest creatures that ever lived, but his interior nature was thoughtful and saturnine. He thought, felt, and understood tragedy, but when he came to act, he was all comedian. At the outset of his career he led the usual life of an itinerant actor. There is a tradition that in the course of his wanderings he once played before George IV at Windsor . After several years in

10541-405: The final chase the "controlled accumulation" of such similes emphasizes Ahab's hubris through a succession of land-images, for instance: "The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field" ("The Chase – Second Day", Ch. 134). A paragraph-long simile describes how the 30 men of the crew became a single unit: For as

10668-619: The first of any of his short fiction to appear in a separate edition when the Nonesuch Press published the Piazza Tales text, illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer. The story is also the first of the short works to which a scholarly publication was devoted: Harold H. Scudder's 1928 study of Melville's use of his major source, Amasa Delano's 1817 A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round

10795-430: The following year to risk the renewed wrath of already hostile reviewers". Under the circumstances, publishing anonymously seemed an attractive strategy, and the firm did ask him to write for Harper's New Monthly Magazine . His contributions to that periodical were not collected in a book during his lifetime. In October 1852, editor Charles Frederick Briggs sent a circular out to writers, including Melville, announcing

10922-427: The fouled lines, is lashed to the whale's back, so Moby Dick turns out to be the hearse Fedallah prophesied. Ahab plants his harpoon in the whale's flank. Moby Dick smites the whaleboat, tossing its men into the sea. Only Ishmael is unable to return to the boat. He is left behind in the sea, and so is the only crewman of the Pequod to survive the final encounter. The whale destroys the Pequod . Ahab then realizes that

11049-626: The gam by rushing back to his ship. The narrator now discusses the subjects of (1) whalers' supply; (2) a glen in Tranque in the Arsacides islands full of carved whale bones, fossil whales, whale skeleton measurements; (3) the chance that the magnitude of the whale will diminish and that the leviathan might perish. Leaving the Samuel Enderby , Ahab wrenches his ivory leg and orders the carpenter to fashion him another. Starbuck informs Ahab of oil leakage in

11176-624: The girl Marianna should remind the reader of both the Marianna in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Alfred Tennyson 's " Mariana ". "Bartleby" is set in the Wall Street office of a New York lawyer, who is the narrator of the tale. His new, pale-looking clerk Bartleby refuses to copy documents without giving any other explanation than the repeated mantra: "I would prefer not to." The lawyer cannot bring himself to remove his clerk from his office and finally resorts to moving out himself. Merton Sealts,

11303-405: The head of the whale, Ahab begs it to speak of the depths of the sea. The Pequod next encounters the Jeroboam , which not only lost its chief mate to Moby Dick, but also is now plagued by an epidemic. The whale carcass still lies in the water. Queequeg mounts it, tied to Ishmael's belt by a monkey-rope as if they were Siamese twins . Stubb and Flask kill a right whale whose head is fastened to

11430-525: The hold. Reluctantly, Ahab orders the harpooneers to inspect the casks. Queequeg, sweating all day below decks, develops a chill and soon is almost mortally feverish. The carpenter makes a coffin for Queequeg, who fears an ordinary burial at sea . Queequeg tries it for size, with Pip sobbing and beating his tambourine, standing by and calling himself a coward while he praises Queequeg for his gameness. Queequeg suddenly rallies, briefly convalesces, and leaps up, back in good health. Henceforth, he uses his coffin for

11557-556: The lucky individual who lives in the white house she looks upon from her window. The narrator understands that he himself has been the object of a fantasy not unlike his own, and leaves thinking how all idealism is an illusion. In addition to numerous biblical and mythological references, which Sealts calls "a familiar Melvillean pattern", the story alludes to Emerson 's poem "The Problem", Don Quixote , and Paradise Lost , and explicitly namechecks Edmund Spenser . The narrator points to some plays by Shakespeare and, according to Sealts,

11684-568: The magazine to Dix and Edwards due to dwindling subscriptions, Briggs left, and George William Curtis became editor. "The Bell-Tower" appeared in 1855 in no. 32 (August). "Benito Cereno" appeared in three installments in 1855, in no. 34 (October), no. 35 (November), and no. 36 (December). Melville's submissions for the magazine were well received. Only once was a submission rejected, "The Two Temples", which remained unpublished during Melville's life. Briggs said he rejected it because: "My editorial experience compels me to be very cautious in offending

11811-410: The meetings plot the "rising curve of his passion" and of his monomania. Third, in contrast to Ahab, Ishmael interprets the significance of each ship individually: "each ship is a scroll which the narrator unrolls and reads". Bezanson sees no single way to account for the meaning of all of these ships. Instead, they may be interpreted as "a group of metaphysical parables, a series of biblical analogues,

11938-455: The mid-1850s show a grasp of his subject matter not previously in his possession, not even in Moby-Dick: "a clarity of exposition and a tonic firmness and finality of implication". John Bryant points to the experimental use of narrative voice in the stories: in addition to third-person narration, Melville makes his fictionalized narrators "less and less reliable." The lawyer-narrator in "Bartleby"

12065-461: The missing is Gardiner's young son. Ahab refuses to join the search. Twenty-four hours a day, Ahab now stands and walks the deck, while Fedallah shadows him. Suddenly, a sea hawk grabs Ahab's slouched hat and flies off with it. Next, the Pequod , in a ninth and final gam, meets the Delight , badly damaged and with five of her crew left dead by Moby Dick. Her captain shouts that the harpoon which can kill

12192-735: The money from the sale to renovate his theatre, which eventually failed. Burton went on to become the editor of the Cambridge Quarterly and the Souvenir . He also wrote several books, including a Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humour in 1857. Burton died on 10 February 1860 in New York City. At the time of his death, he had collected a library of over 100,000 volumes, especially rich in books by and relating to William Shakespeare . He left his fortune to charity but his wife Elizabeth, from whom he had separated 26 years earlier, arrived from England to claim dower. Judgment initially went against her but after

12319-494: The novel's "central consciousness and narrative voice". Walter Bezanson first distinguishes Ishmael as narrator from Ishmael as character, whom he calls "forecastle Ishmael", the younger Ishmael of some years ago. Narrator Ishmael, then, is "merely young Ishmael grown older". A second distinction is between either or both Ishmaels with the author Herman Melville. Bezanson warns readers to "resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and Ishmael". According to critic Walter Bezanson,

12446-662: The one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to. ("The Chase – Second Day", Ch. 134). William Evans Burton William Evans Burton (24 September 1804  – 10 February 1860)

12573-420: The other half of this pattern, begins with the book's first description of live whales, and next the anatomy of the sperm whale is studied, more or less from front to rear and from outer to inner parts, all the way down to the skeleton. Two concluding chapters set forth the whale's evolution as a species and claim its eternal nature. Some "ten or more" of the chapters on whale killings, beginning at two-fifths of

12700-472: The other made of American wood — that Fedallah will precede his captain in death, and finally that only hemp can kill Ahab. As the Pequod approaches the Equator , Ahab scolds his quadrant for telling him only where he is and not where he will be. He dashes it to the deck. That evening, an impressive typhoon attacks the ship. Lightning strikes the mast, setting the doubloon and Ahab's harpoon aglow. Ahab delivers

12827-469: The participial modifier to emphasize and to reinforce the already established expectations of the reader, as the words "preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene ..."; "In this foreshadowing interval ..."). Other characteristic stylistic elements are the echoes and overtones, both imitation of distinct styles and habitual use of sources to shape his own work. His three most important sources, in order, are

12954-512: The plan "to publish an Original periodical of a character different from any now in existence", inviting him, being among "the best talent of the country", to submit contributions to the new monthly that would only print American contributions. This was Putnam's Monthly Magazine that first appeared in January 1853. With the ambition to be, in Perry Miller's words, "the vehicle of home literature" came

13081-468: The predecessor of the biblical King Ahab . Her "prophetic" fate is "a message of warning to all who follow, articulated by Gabriel and vindicated by the Samuel Enderby , the Rachel , the Delight , and at last the Pequod ". None of the other ships has been completely destroyed because none of their captains shared Ahab's monomania ; the fate of the Jeroboam reinforces the structural parallel between Ahab and his biblical namesake: "Ahab did more to provoke

13208-472: The price of self-reliance when it is pushed to the point of solipsism , where the world has no existence apart from the all-sufficient self." In that regard, Chase sees Melville's art as antithetical to that of Emerson's thought, in that Melville "[points] up the dangers of an exaggerated self-regard, rather than, as ... Emerson loved to do, [suggested] the vital possibilities of the self". Newton Arvin further suggests that self-reliance was, for Melville, really

13335-529: The provinces, he made his first London appearance in 1831 at the Pavilion Theatre as Wormwood in The Lottery Ticket , in which part he was much admired, and which he then acted there upward of fifty consecutive times. John Liston was then the reigning favourite in London ( Joseph Shepherd Munden , who died in 1832, being in decadence), and next to Liston stood John Reeve , upon whom it is thought that

13462-468: The purpose of making the stories to appear "more closely joined than they actually are." The contract for the book was signed on 17 March 1856. It was advertised on 5 April as "in press" and should have been available by 15 May—though a copy was deposited for copyright on May 20. The volume was printed by Miller & Holman, Printers and Stereotypers, of New York, as a duodecimo volume of 431 pages, excluding seven pages of advertisements for other products by

13589-463: The religious sensibilities of the public, and the moral of the Two Temples would array against us the whole power of the pulpit." Of another story he said: "The only complaint that I have heard about the Encantadas was that it might have been longer." In addition to the five stories, Melville wrote an introductory story for which the volume was titled. Scholar Douglas Robillard believes that this served

13716-422: The same publishers. Biographer Parker observes that to reach that number of pages the book was padded out by leaving excessive white space. The front and back covers were ornamented by a border of rules and rosettes, and the spine displayed the title and the names of the author and publishers stamped in gold. It was priced at $ 1.00 and 2,500 copies were printed, of which only 1,047 were sold by the end of August; this

13843-514: The sea before he can answer. Ishmael explains that because of Ahab's absorption with Moby Dick, he sails on without the customary "gam", which Ishmael defines as a "social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships", in which the two captains remain on one ship and the chief mates on the other. In the second gam off the Cape of Good Hope, with the Town-Ho , a Nantucket whaler, the concealed story of a "judgment of God"

13970-681: The sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales. ("Nantucket", Ch. 14). Bezanson calls this chapter

14097-485: The slaves have seized command of the ship after a revolt and forced the white crew to keep up appearances. "The Encantadas" consists of ten sketches, "based primarily on recollections of Melville's visit to the Galápagos Islands during his whaling years," elaborated with material from several books, including works by Charles Darwin and Amasa Delano. The other two stories are shorter pieces. "The Lightning-Rod Man"

14224-539: The stage. The first step in his theatrical career, as usual, was to join an amateur dramatic society, and it is said that about this time he gave a performance of Hamlet somewhere on the Strand. In 1825 he was associated with a provincial company acting at Norwich , and elsewhere in England, and he played low comedy. His aspirations at the start were for the tragic, and it is known that late in life he still at times entertained

14351-419: The stories as predominantly comics, depicting failure, compromise, and misery, with metaphysical concerns almost entirely absent. Biographer Andrew Delbanco cites "The Bell-Tower" as a story that "merited the caution" of Curtis not to accept Melville's submissions for Putnam's too easily. Moby-Dick Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 epic novel by American writer Herman Melville . The book

14478-485: The stories to Edgar Allan Poe's work. Sealts saw thirty-seven reviews, five of which were "preponderantly unfavorable," among them the sole British review of the group, which appeared in the London Athenaeum for 26 July. Yet, he said, the reviews showed that the book "manifestly pleased [Melville's] critics as no other work from his pen had done since the appearance of Redburn and White-Jacket in 1849 and 1850." Most of

14605-567: The supporting characters "could easily have come from the pen of Dickens, Lamb or Irving." The idea for the story was suggested to Melville by an 18 February 1853 advertisement for James A. Maitland's The Lawyer's Story in both the New York Times and Tribune that included the complete first chapter of the forthcoming novel, in which a lawyer's increased business makes him hire an extra copying clerk. The ten sketches of "The Encantadas" go back to Melville's whaling years, during which he visited

14732-499: The three boats that seek him, and tangles their lines. Ahab is rescued, but his ivory leg and Fedallah are lost. Starbuck begs Ahab to desist, but Ahab vows to slay the white whale, even if he would have to dive through the globe itself to get his revenge. On the third day of the chase, Ahab sights Moby Dick at noon. Sharks appear as well. Ahab lowers his boat for the final time, leaving Starbuck again on board. Moby Dick breaches and destroys two boats. Fedallah's corpse, still entangled in

14859-599: The title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in the text of both editions as "Moby Dick", without the hyphen. Reviewers in Britain were largely favorable, though some objected that the tale seemed to be told by a narrator who perished with the ship, as the British edition lacked the epilogue recounting Ishmael's survival. American reviewers were more hostile. Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts , with plans to sign up for

14986-534: The vortex when the Pequod sinks. For a day and a night, Ishmael floats on it, until the Rachel , still looking for its lost seamen, rescues him. Ishmael is the narrator, shaping his story with the use of many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings. Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing of the book: "But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself? I must, else all these chapters might be naught." Scholar John Bryant calls him

15113-475: The warm oil is decanted into casks, and then stowed in the ship. After the operation, the decks are scrubbed. The coin hammered to the main mast shows three Andes summits, one with a flame, one with a tower, and one a crowing cock. Ahab stops to look at the doubloon and interprets the coin as signs of his firmness, volcanic energy, and victory; Starbuck takes the high peaks as evidence of the Trinity ; Stubb focuses on

15240-704: The whale can be seen as a metaphor for an epistemological quest—in the words of biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant, "man's search for meaning in a world of deceptive appearances and fatal delusions". Ishmael's taxonomy of whales merely demonstrates "the limitations of scientific knowledge and the impossibility of achieving certainty". She also contrasts Ishmael's and Ahab's attitudes toward life, with Ishmael's open-minded and meditative, "polypositional stance" as antithetical to Ahab's monomania , adhering to dogmatic rigidity. Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco cites race as an example of this search for truth beneath surface differences, noting that all races are represented among

15367-474: The white whale has yet to be forged, but Ahab flourishes his special lance and once more orders the ship forward. Ahab shares a moment of contemplation with Starbuck. Ahab speaks about his wife and child, calls himself a fool for spending 40 years on whaling, and claims he can see his own child in Starbuck's eye. Starbuck tries to persuade Ahab to return to Nantucket to meet both their families, but Ahab simply crosses

15494-466: The zodiacal arch over the mountains; and Flask sees nothing of any symbolic value at all. The Manxman mutters in front of the mast, and Pip declines the verb "look". The Pequod next gams with the Samuel Enderby of London, captained by Boomer, a down-to-earth fellow who lost his right arm to Moby Dick. Nevertheless, he carries no ill will toward the whale, which his ship's surgeon, Dr. Bunger, describes not as malicious, but as awkward. Ahab puts an end to

15621-496: Was "the first retrospective survey of Melville's career anyone had ever published". Melville's first contribution, "Bartleby. A Story of Wall-Street", was published in two installments in the magazine's first year of existence, in no. 11 (November), and no. 12 (December). "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" appeared in three installments in 1854, in no. 15 (March), no. 16 (April), and no. 17 (May). "The Lightning-Rod Man" appeared in 1854, in no. 20 (August). In March 1855, Putnam sold

15748-452: Was a better judge of popular taste than he recently had been as a novelist, Sealts finds. He read contemporary newspapers and magazines, and paid careful attention to what they were carrying. By studying the contents, Melville "learned to pattern his own pieces accordingly, with respect to both form and content." A number of the pieces contain references to persons, places, and events Melville witnessed himself. People whom Melville knew served as

15875-499: Was an English actor, playwright, theatre manager and publisher who relocated to the United States. Born in London on 24 September 1804, Burton was the son of William George Burton (1774–1825), a printer and the author of Research into the religions of the Eastern nations as illustrative of the scriptures in 1805. Intended for a career in the church, Burton was a pupil at St. Paul's School in London, an institution associated also with

16002-653: Was not enough to cover expenses. In June, the book was advertised together with another as "TWO GOOD SUMMER BOOKS". In 1922, three years after the centennial of Melville's birth, the first reissue of the collection appeared as part of the Constable collected edition. "The Lightning-Rod Man" was chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton 's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, with an illustration by Henry Louis Stephens . No other original illustration for one of his works appeared during Melville's lifetime. Resissues of

16129-488: Was offered "almost invariably in a tone of affection and respect, without a single known mention of Moby-Dick", Parker observes. Many reviews echoed that the collection made for excellent summer reading: "Scarcely a pleasanter book for summer reading could be recommended" was a representative phrase, printed in the New York Churchman for 5 June. In 1926, during the so-called "Melville Revival," "Benito Cereno" became

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