Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A charming (if over-the-top) spoof of Revolutionary heroics
After the financial failure of "Moby-Dick" and the social scandal of "Pierre," Melville settled down to write a book that would please the public, his publisher, and (most important at this point in his life) his bank account. He promised George Putnam (his publisher) both "nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious" and "nothing weighty." In short, he wrote an adventure story.

But not just any adventure story. Melville drew on a little-known autobiography published 30 years earlier and called the "Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter," which recounted the extraordinary career of a veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill who delivered secret wartime letters to Benjamin Franklin, who found himself stranded in Europe, and who ended up a pauper in London. (The original Northwestern-Newberry edition reprints a facsimile copy of this source, keyed to passages in Melville's text. More remarkably, this edition notes the recent discovery of an unrelated text by a British author who included a brief account of Potter's days as a nomadic street-trader in London, along with a portrait of the man himself.)

Yet Melville's book is not merely a biographical novel. Instead, he greatly embellishes Potter's account, incorporating a farcical portrait of Franklin and adding equally comic accounts of John Paul Jones, King George, Ethan Allen, and several other historical figures whom Potter never actually met. In Melville's hands, Franklin becomes a miserly, philandering "tanned Machiavelli in tents" and "not less a lady's man, than a man's man, a wise man, and an old man"; Allen is transformed into a larger-than-life Paul Bunyan figure; King George is a kindly dolt; and Jones turns into a tattooed, flirtatious, vainglorious rake. And poor Israel Potter himself is alternately drafted, imprisoned, released, and press-ganged.

The result is not only Melville's most accessible work but also an over-the-top spoof of the heroic amateurs running the Revolution and (more subtly) an acidic indictment of the abandonment of the early American dream. While it lacks the depth or the "weight" of his other late works, "Israel Potter" makes up for its shortcomings with charm and mirth.

The least known and most humorous of Melville's works.
This book is at the same time the least and the most "Melvillian" of all Melville's corpus.Melville wrote in Moby-Dick that "two thirds of the world revolve in darkness."This idea certaily holds true for most of Melville's works, but not Israel Potter.In this uncharacteristically light-hearted and crisply written rewriting of American history, Melville gives an early literary version of Woody Allen's film Zelig.The character Israel Potter is that same sort of insignificant historical non-entity who just happens to get caught up in incredibly significant historical moments.In his various wanderings Israel meets and becomes politically involved with a trio of the most important American patriots--Ben Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen.It is through these encounters that Melville subtlely (and sometimes not so subtlely) realizes his critical agenda and those darker themes that dominate so much of his other work begin to show themselves.In his portrayal of Franklin, Melville takes a bash at what he sees as the exemplar of American "genius"--the same American genius that ignored and misunderstood his most significant works and forced him into obscurity and poverty in his lifetime.Melville sees Franklin as representative of all that is wrong with the American character--he is parsimonious, small-minded, hard-headed, and morally hypocritical.In the other two historical figures, John Paul Jones and Ethan Allen, Melville finds redemption.In them he sees represented more of that European idea of genius, the manly half-savage/half-civilized genius of Thomas Carlyle.Like Queequeg in Moby-Dick who is described as "George Washington canabalistically rendered," Jones and Allen are wildmen in a civilized society, raging against the world as they utter their outrageous and at times incomprehensible truth.A fun yet undenialbly thought-provoking read.Enjoy ... Read more

Customer Reviews (314)

A magnificent book
A magnificent book.It's about so much more than just a whale and a captain. It's an encyclopedia of whaling. The story is told in such beautiful prose that many times I found it hard to believe that an actual person wrote it.The only challenge is the very complex writing structure. I've never seen so many semicolons.

Review of Kindle version, not of Melvilles's masterpiece
I own the Penguin published version of this book as well as the Kindle "Penguin" version.While MOST of Melville's "Leviathanic" work is here, there are some serious omissions and problems with the Kindle version of this publication.Here they are, in the order they occur to me as I write this:

1. There is no cover art
2. There are none of the very useful diagrams and drawings present at the back of the actual Penguin publication
3. There is no table of contents (This is VERY annoying in a book that begs frequent reference to various chapters, especially one already divided into 100+ chapters)
4. None of the textual emendations are enumerated
5. There are MANY textual mistakes, including wrong words, repeated words and other typos
6. The glossary from the Penguin edition has been eliminated and the Kindle stock "OAD" Dictionary is nearly worthless
7. The explanatory notes from the Penguin publication has been omitted (especially vexing given the hypertext possibilities of the Kindle)

Whether this is your first time with this seminal work, or you just want an electronic copy for your portable library, I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS RENDERING.Overall the Digireads "Penguin" version feels as though it was carelessly rushed into being.

The Book's reputation outweighs its value...
If ever a book was made for skimming - or for Classics Illustrated, for that matter - Moby Dick is it.I had the misfortune of listening to it as a book on tape, and let me tell you, of the 27 hours of narration, I would estimate that only 4 deal directly with Character or Plot.

The rest of it is a grab-bag of whaling industry history, exacting description of whaling technology, inexact biology and philosophical musings that wander far, far afield. After reading Mark Twain's hilarious dissection of "The Last of the Mohicans", I can only imagine what he would do with "Moby Dick".

The London Literary Gazette, December 6 1851, review of the newly published Moby Dick sums up my feelings:


"This is an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive. The author has read up laboriously to make a show of cetalogical learning.... Herman Melville is wise in this sort of wisdom. He uses it as stuffing to fill out his skeleton story. Bad stuffing it makes, serving only to try the patience of his readers, and to tempt them to wish both him and his whales at the bottom of an unfathomable sea....

The story of this novel scarcely deserves the name.... Mr. Melville cannot do without savages so he makes half of his dramatis personae wild Indians, Malays, and other untamed humanities.... What the author's original intention in spinning his preposterous yarn was, it is impossible to guess; evidently, when we compare the first and third volumes, it was never carried out....

Having said so much that may be interpreted as a censure, it is right that we should add a word of praise where deserved. There are sketches of scenes at sea, of whaling adventures, storms, and ship-life, equal to any we have ever met with....

Mr. Herman Melville has earned a deservedly high reputation for his performances in descriptive fiction. He has gathered his own materials, and travelled along fresh and untrodden literary paths, exhibiting powers of no common order, and great originality. The more careful, therefore, should he be to maintain the fame he so rapidly acquired, and not waste his strength on such purposeless and unequal doings as these rambling volumes about spermaceti whales."

That was written before the book gained its 20th Century Reputation, one I sadly feel is undeserved.

Not an "easy" read, but I loved it
Moby Dick was yet another shocker, the story was so much deeper than I expected. Even in areas you would not think, here is an example:

-And Heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if it's vast tides were a concience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.-

You just don't find that in most modern writings! Every word has power and meaning. Every characters action has purpose. So if you want a deep book, and have a little time on your hands -the mountain of pages can intimidate some- sit back and enjoy a great story.

a bit drawn out but amazing prose
Wow!Every aspiring writer should give this a read...or then again maybe they shouldn't since it may be too depressing to read something this good.Like Joseph Conrad's works, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, Moby-Dick is somewhat autobiographical, at least in the sense that Melville took to the high seas in a whaling boat in the middle of his life, prior to writing this.As a high schooler I found this book terribly boring, but now I mainly see it as amazingly well written.Kids probably shouldn't be forced to read classic literature because they generally don't appreciate it.In a sense, the whole novel is one long buildup to the final devastating scene, and perhaps there's some Freudian or other indirect psychological meaning to that layout of the story, but you'll have to find an expert for the correct interpretation.Apparently, Melville wasn't particularly commerically successful in his lifetime, partly because he was unconventional in style and wouldn't crank out mindless rubbish.Billy Budd is also certainly worth reading again.In summary, Moby-Dick should be required reading for every adult!Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health. ... Read more

Product Description
THIS BOOK IS SET IN 10 POINT LINOTRON GALLIARD, A FACE DESIGNED FOR PHOTOCOMPOSITION BY MATTHEW CARTER AND BASED ON THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FACE GRANJON. THE BINDING MATERIAL IS BRILLIANTA, A 100% WOVEN RAYON CLOTH MADE BY VAN HEEK-SCHOLCO TEXTIELFABRIEKEN, HOLLAND. IT HAS ALSO BEAUTIFUL GILDING ON SPINE AND SLIPCASE, DECORATIVE ENDPAPERS AND SATIN BOOKMARK. THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA HAS BEEN PUBLISHING FOR 20 YEARS, DEDICATED TO BRINGING AMERICAN CLASSICS TO THE MASSES. THEY ARE FAST BECOMING COLLECTABLES, AND ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR STATELY LOOK AS WELL AS THE MOST STURDY SLIPCASES OF ANY PUBLISHER. ... Read more

Book Description
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In "Benito Cereno," he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

a treasure
A wonderful collection of some fine stories by one of the greatest writers America will ever produce. ... Read more

Book Description
A comprehensive collection of the poetry of a presiding genius of American literature

While best known for such novels as his monumental Moby-Dick, Herman Melville was also an extraordinarily gifted poet. This is the most complete anthology of Melville’s poetry ever published in a single volume. It features a large selection from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, along with Melville’s own notes and prose supplement; cantos from all four books of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land; selections from Melville’s later books, Timoleon, John Marr and Other Sailors, and Weeds and Wildings, Chiefly, with a Rose or Two; as well as a number of his powerful and lesserknown uncollected poems. This volume will usher in a new appreciation for Melville’s poetic gifts. ... Read more

Book Description

The first volume of Hershel Parker's definitive biography of Herman Melville--a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize--closed on a mid-November day in 1851. In the dining room of the Little Red Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, Melville had just presented an inscribed copy of his new novel, Moby-Dick, to his intimate friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the man to whom the work was dedicated. "Take it all in all," Parker concluded, "this was the happiest day of Melville's life."

Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 chronicles Melville's life in rich detail, from this ecstatic moment to his death, in obscurity, forty years later. Parker describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer bad luck that doomed Moby-Dick to failure (and its author to prolonged indebtedness), the savage reviews he received for his next book Pierre, and his inability to have the novel The Isle of the Cross -- now lost -- published at all. Melville turned to magazine fiction, writing the now-classic "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno," and produced a final novel, The Confidence Man, a mordant satire of American optimism. Over his last three decades, while working as a customs inspector in Manhattan, Melville painstakingly remade himself as a poet, crafting the centennial epic Clarel, in which he sorted out his complex feelings for Hawthorne, and the masterful story "Billy Budd," originally written as a prose headnote to an unfinished poem.

Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. The concluding volume of Herman Melville: A Biography confirms Hershel Parker's position as the world's leading Melville scholar, demonstrating his unrivaled biographical, literary, and historical imagination and providing a rich new portrait of a great--and profoundly American -- artist.

From reviews of the first volume:

"Unquestionably the most searching biography ever written on Herman Melville." -- Philip Weiss, New York Times Magazine

"A magnificent achievement... Hershel Parker's magnum opus is a magisterial work of retrieval and unflagging scholarship." -- Harold Beaver, Times Literary Supplement

"An awesome achievement, indispensable for all serious Melvillians, with the vividness of a great Victorian novel and the precision of the finest historical scholarship." -- Robert Faggen, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Customer Reviews (3)

Stoic endurance and masterful control
Hershel Parker has given Melville scholars and enthusiasts a valuable gift -- a scholarly examination of a life embedded in a rich context of significant relationships. Parker's presentation of evidence is all we can hope for -- a carefully balanced narrative based on primary sources where the reader benefits from a scholar's lifetime of careful research and thoughtful consideration. Drawing from an astounding wealth of primary sources, Parker walks us through Melville's life with a chronological continuity that scarcely misses a month of activity in a forty year period, articulating in rich detail Melville's interactions with people, places, and publications.

Through a careful accounting of time and travels, many puzzles are brought into clearer light. Volume Two begins with the puzzle of The Whale's reception -- Melville may never have learned of the broad praise for The Whale in England, despite the disconcerting omission of the book's final chapter by the publisher. Next, the puzzle of Pierre's career as a Young Author -- prompted by Evert Duykinck's evident betrayal as much as a devaluation of his earning potential by the Harpers, Melville interpolated a satirical diabtribe into the innovative psychological romance, Pierre. We discover lost works -- Melville developed at least three major works that were never published: Isle of the Cross (rejected), the Tortoise Hunters (incomplete or discarded), and a volume of poems in 1860 (rejected). We find what happened between his last magazine publication and the start of the Civil War: we are given a clear picture of Melville's three winters on the lecture circuit, during which he began a dedicated effort to convert from prose to poetry. Finally, we discover Melville the poet -- while holding down a low-paid job to support his family, Melville stoically endures a long period of discouraging personal setbacks during which he improves his mastery of metrical form through dedicated study and artful discernment. His creative mind is constantly at work, although his energies are strained by competing demands on his attention. With Clarel, Melville demonstrates a masterful control of theme, form, and allusion, and with John Marr and Timoleon, we meet a poet who innovated constantly, re-working and improving his stylistic experiments over many years.

Melville's mid-life challenges are of the sort that most humans face, complicated by an uncertain career, the death of two sons, and an awkward estrangement from his wife (temporary) and daughters (permanent?). He outlives most of his close relatives and friends, people he loved and who loved him, and on whom he relied for decades. Melville's natural tendency toward a self-contained privacy leads him toward a stoical reclusiveness, although he remains actively engaged with the world throughout his restless wanderings, both physical and philosophical. The biography concludes on an upward note; late in life, Melville learns by degrees of a dedicated following in England, while some of his best work is still in manuscript form, waiting to be printed some thirty years after his death.

The great pleasure of reading Parker is the way he interpolates explanations as an aid to the reader's assessment, scrupulously avoiding any forced conclusions based on ambiguous evidence. With Parker, the author is in control of the presentation, but we are allowed to apply our own critical thought toward the evidence. No conclusions are forced on us, and we encounter few intrusions by the biographer. To my mind, this is an ideal biography.

Tedious Beyond Belief
Little is known about the last forty reclusive years of Melville's life, and Parker adds virtually nothing of significance to alleviate that dearth of knowledge or insight. If you are fascinated by reams of inconsequential family correspondence, you will enjoy this book. If you are interested in Herman Melville, don't waste your time on this boring tome.

a baby whale trying to get out of this behemoth
Inside Hershel Parker's 900-page second volume of his life of Herman Melville is a 300-page biography trying to get out. The story Parker tells of the second half of Melville's career--from the failure of Moby Dick in 1851 through the forty years Melville slowly disappeared from the American consciousnes--is a fascinating, corrective tale of the blindness of American critics and readers alike. (At the end of his life, in 1891, his rebirth was just beginning, in England, but in the U.S. he was considered a failure--when he was considered at all. He would not be rediscovered here until the 1920s.) But in Parker's biography, that fascinating story is lost among the doings of the dozens of relatives who made up Melville's family, and whose manuscripts--letters, diaries, notes--Parker uses exhaustively. We learn more finally about 19th century extended family life than we do about the man at the center of this one. Melville's story is a sad one, but Parker could have told it in a third of this length. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Short and boring
I was assigned to read this book in my English class either during 7th grade or 8th grade.This short story is of a young man named Billy Budd who is serving in the English navy.Billy is a nice, affable person who everyone on the ship likes except for Claggart, the master-at-arms.Claggart wants to get rid of Billy and accuses him of preparing to mutiny.The ship's captain brings both of them before him and asks Claggart to repeat his accusation.Upon doing so, Billy punches him and kills him.As punishment, Captain Vere has Billy hung.No explanations are given as to why Claggart hates Billy so much.The entire story delves into the idea of malevolance; doing evil for the sake of evil, and how an innocent person can be corrupted by malevolence.I read this book during my time in middle school, along with other similar books such as Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men.What I found running thru all three books is the theme of bullying.Claggart was a bully, just like some of the older kids in Lord of the Flies, and the smart one in Of Mice and Men.Others have looked at Billy Budd as Melville's examination of good versus evil, the corruption of innocence, and the ability of human reason to sort out good and evil.I see this book as another story of bullying, except here the bully got what he deserved (a punch) and then some (death).Unfortunately, the society about Billy (the ship) did not see bullying as an excuse for his action, just like today if a beaten housewife shoots her husband, she gets sent to jail even though she was just defending herself.

All in all a short and depressing book.I am glad to have read it, since it is considered a classic, though I would never read it again. ... Read more