Herman Melville

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is a novel, the seventh book, by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The plot, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendenning; his widowed mother; Glendenning Stanley, his …

The Confidence-Man is an ambiguous figure who sneaks aboard a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day. This stranger attempts to test the confidence of the several steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. The novel is written as cultural …

This first volume of The Library of America's three-volume edition of the complete prose works of Herman Melville includes three romances of the South Seas. Typee and Omoo, based on the young Melville's experiences on a whaling ship, are exuberant accounts of the idyllic life among the "cannibals" in Polynesia. They …

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is the first book of poetry published by American author Herman Melville. The volume is dedicated "To the Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand Who in the War For the Maintenance of the Union Fell Devotedly Under the Flag of Their Country" and its 72 poems deal with the battles and …