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Great Short Works of Herman Melville

herman melville

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Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby, the Scrivener are two of the most revered shorter works of fiction in history. Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a beautifully redesigned collection that represents the best short work of an American master.As Warner Berthoff writes in his introduction to this volume, "It is hard to think of a major novelist or storyteller who is not also a first-rate entertainer . . . a master, according to choice, of high comedy, of one or another robust species of expressive humour, or of some special variety of the preposterous, the grotesque, the absurd. And Melville, certainly, is no exception. A kind of vigorous supervisory humour is his natural idiom as a writer, and one particular attraction of his shorter work is the fresh further display it offers of this prime element in his literary character."

The town-ho's story --
Bartleby, the scrivener : a story of Wall-Street --
Cock-a-doodle-doo! or, The crowing of the noble cock Beneventano --
The encantadas or Enchanted Isles --
The two temples --
Poor man's pudding and rich man's crumbs --The happy failure : a story of the river Hudson --
The lightning-rod man --
The fiddler --
The paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids --
The bell-tower --
Benito Cereno --
Jimmy Rose --
I and my chimney --
The 'Gees --
The apple-tree table, or Original spiritual manifestations --
The piazza --
The Marquis de Grandvin --
Three "Jack Gentian sketches" --
John Marr --
Daniel Orme --
Billy Budd, sailor.

512 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1969

This edition

Format
512 pages, Paperback
Published
March 2, 2004 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ISBN
9780060586546
ASIN
0060586540
Language
English

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About the author

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herman melville

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There is more than one author with this name

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.
From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.7 / 5.0, 33 votes)
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33 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
xGothimisalolix
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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The first week of reading this for class I was very sympathetic to Melville's skepticism. I'm over it now. Melville needs to make a damn point, and he just never does! He raises too many issues in his stories (*cough cough* "Billy Budd") and never actually reaches any conclusions. "Apple Tree Table" was the only story where he actually concluded something, and it was about weird spiritualism and a ticking table. Think I need to read about Anne Shirley now so that I can revive from the soul rot that Melville produced. I'm so over it.
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pt8732
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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The stories looming largest on the cover will matter the most to most of you. Melville's other miscellanea draw a hard line between his short-form mastery and Hawthorne's. Practically any Hawthorne story is worth reading, but I can't say the same for entries like "The Two Temples". "The Encantadas" is a little too reminiscent of his earlier novels for me to enjoy, more like a travelogue (one with disquieting tortoise-flipping action) than great literature. "Benito Cereno" seems a little bloated, mocking the "Short Works" section of the title, and isn't as enjoyable as Melville's best. "Billy Budd" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" are the jewels of this collection in my eyes.
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VendettaJake
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Some stories in this collection were seriously entertaining, and several provided a great look at life in the times of Melville, in the places he lived and visited (the Galapogos, England and the colonies).
On the other hand, many stories open with criticism of the story, and claims of disbelief that it had managed to be printed in its day. These stories manage to be a slower read than Moby Dick itself, and have no place in a collection named the greatest of Melville.
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minachan24
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I adore Melville! Every one of his short works or sketches hit me in just the right mood. If you read nothing else in this life, read Melville.
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FearQuare
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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"Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno" are nice tales, but my very most favorite Melville piece is far and away "I and My Chimney." After reading it I managed to find a few pictures posted on line of the home where Melville was living and of which he was writing in "I and My Chimney." I have started Moby Dick several times and I know I should love it, but to be honest I don't think I have ever managed--even in preparation for a test while in college--to reach the final page. Give me "I and My Chimney," the essays, the short stories. Let the rest of the world and serious readers have that nasty great whale.
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SatanAbyss
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Listening to Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd not long ago, I realized how long it has been since I read Melville's story, so that's what inspired me to bring out this volume.

There are really only four "great" stories in the book:

* "Bartleby, the Scrivener," that astonishing imaginative bridge between Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka.
* "The Encantadas," an imaginative travelogue to the Galápagos, seen not as Darwin's laboratory of natural selection nor as the ecotourist's endangered paradise, but as the Fallen World in its raw essence.
* "Benito Cereno," the most mechanically structured of Melville's tales but also the one that raises the most unsettling questions about its theme and tone.
* "Billy Budd," that inexhaustible fable about innocence and experience, intellect and nature, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, as well as one of the nineteenth century's most provocative, if veiled, explorations of same-sex attraction.

As for the rest of the stories, none of them stand out. But you should read them anyway to understand the way Melville's moral imagination works. Sadly, Warner Berthoff's introduction is a bit of a slog through the academic fog, but there are nuggets to be gleaned from it.

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Zeal_Seal
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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While I enjoyed some of these (Billy Budd, Sailor; Benito Cereno; Bartleby, the Scrivener; Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs; The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids; The Apple-Tree Table) - to various extents -, I skimmed most of them because I couldn't get into the story.
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RandomFD
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Loved this one. I never realized that Melville was such an accomplished satirist and humorist. My favorite selections were "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!," "Benito Cereno," and "I and My Chimney."
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