Back Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Billy Budd, Uncollected Prose

Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Billy Budd, Uncollected Prose

Edited by Harrison Hayford

A reprint for this title is at press and is expected to arrive in December.

“A landmark achievement, one in keeping with The Library of America’s already sterling reputation of providing the best in American literature at a reasonable price.” — The Chattanooga Times

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Herman Melville, “Jimmy Rose”
August 1, 2022

Interviews LOA celebrates Herman Melville’s 200th birthday with his Complete Poems
September 23, 2019

News Nathaniel Philbrick asks Why Read Moby-Dick? and many rise to the “cunning test”
August 8, 2019

This is the third of four Library of America volumes that present the complete works of Herman Melville. The later writings gathered here contain some of Melville’s finest fiction and many of his keenest and bleakest observations of life, not on the high seas, but at home in America.

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, published in 1852, the year after Moby-Dick, moves between the idyllic Berkshire countryside and the nightmare landscape of an unnamed New York City. 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. Long a controversial work, it is Melville’s darkest satire of American life and letters and one of his most powerful books.

Pierre was followed three years later by Israel Potter, the story of a veteran of the Revolution who is victim to a thousand mischances and a long-suffering exile in England. Along the way are memorably written episodes of war and intrigue, with lively portraits of Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and George III. In the exploits of this touchingly optimistic soldier, Melville offers a scathing image of the collapse of revolutionary hopes.

The Piazza Tales demonstrate Melville’s dazzling mastery of many styles, including “The Encantadas,” about nature’s two faces—enchanting and horrific; the famous “Bartleby the Scrivener,” about a Wall Street copyist who “would prefer not to”; and the enigmatic “Benito Cereno,” about a credulous Yankee sea captain who stumbles into an intricately plotted mutiny aboard a disabled slave ship.

The Confidence-Man, Melville’s last published novel, is in many ways a forerunner of modernist American fiction. An extended meditation on faith, hope, and charity as these are manifested on board a Mississippi riverboat one April Fools’ Day, it presents a menagerie of Americans buying and selling, borrowing and lending, believing and mistrusting, as they are carried toward the auction blocks of New Orleans.

Here as well are many short works never before collected: the “Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack” (burlesque sketches of Zachary Taylor’s Mexican campaign), “Fragments from a Writing-Desk” (Melville’s earliest surviving prose), reviews of Hawthorne, Parkman, and Cooper, and all the tales Melville published in magazines during the 1850s.

Finally, there is the posthumously published masterpiece Billy Budd, Sailor, the haunting story of a beautiful, innocent sailor who is pressed into naval service, slandered, provoked to murder, and sacrificed to military justice. While encouraging questions for which there are no answers, it invites us to meditate on the conflicts central to all Melville’s work: between freedom and fate, innocence and civilized corruption.

Harrison Hayford (1916–2001), editor of this volume, was one of the preeminent Melville scholars of the last century. A longtime professor of English at Northwestern University, he was co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Works of Herman Melville.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Billy Budd, Uncollected Prose is kept in print by a gift from Jerard P. Reilly to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in honor of Grace Eleanor Reilly.
News & Views

Story of the Week Herman Melville, “Jimmy Rose”
August 1, 2022

Interviews LOA celebrates Herman Melville’s 200th birthday with his Complete Poems
September 23, 2019

News Nathaniel Philbrick asks Why Read Moby-Dick? and many rise to the “cunning test”
August 8, 2019

The Moviegoer Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd: Elemental conflict in a vivid tapestry of life at sea
August 1, 2019

Interviews The War Before the War: Andrew Delbanco on fugitive slaves and the fragility of the American Republic
November 20, 2018
Table of Contents

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile

The Piazza Tales
The Piazza
Bartleby, the Scrivener
Benito Cereno
The Lightning-Rod Man
The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles
The Bell-Tower

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

Uncollected Prose
Articles and Reviews
Etchings of a Whaling Cruise
Authentic Anecdotes of “Old Zack”
Mr Parkman’s Tour
Cooper’s New Novel
A Thought on Book-Binding
Hawthorne and His Mosses
Tales
Fragments from a Writing Desk
The Happy Failure
The Fiddler
Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!
Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs
The Two Temples
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids
Jimmy Rose
The ‘Gees
I and My Chimney
The Apple-Tree Table

Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)

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ISBN: 978-0-940450-24-0 1478 pages

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N° 24 Library of America Series

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