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

herman melville

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Forgoing the narratives of the sea that prevailed in his earlier works, Melville's later fiction contains some of the finest and many of his keenest and bleakest observations of life, not on the high seas, but at home in America. With the publication of this Library of America volume, the third of three volumes, all Melville's fiction has now been restored to print for the first time.

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, published in 1852 (the year after Moby-Dick), moves between the idyllic Berkshire countryside and the nightmare landscape of early 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.

A pivotal work, both for Melville's career and for American literature, Pierre was followed by Israel Potter, the story of a veteran of the Revolution, victim of a thousand mischances, and a long-suffering exile in England. Along the way are memorable episodes of war and intrigue, with personal 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 demonstrates 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.

Many pieces never before collected are also included: 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.

1478 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1985

This edition

Format
1478 pages, Hardcover
Published
April 1, 1985 by Library of America
ISBN
9780940450240
ASIN
0940450240
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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Rating(4.2 / 5.0, 19 votes)
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19 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
JapaneseDuck
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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NOTE: Of the titles in this volume, this review concerns only The Confidence Man.

Melville’s last novel was met mostly with ignorance. Perhaps it was Melville’s form and style, summed by his own words, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.” Though more true of Moby Dick than The Confidence Man, I suspect readers still didn’t quite know what to make of a novel that, despite being orderly by comparison, was nearly three-quarters dialog; without a discernable plot; and having no protagonist. However, the theme itself – an excoriation of “blind faith” in personal and business dealings – is the plot and protagonist. Ironically, it was a study of ignorance. Naturally, it was ignored.
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shadowsky7
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Absolutely beautiful, full of the late and more subtle vintage nursed in Melville's later obscurity.
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VanniePon
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Well I have only read Moby Dick so far, but I still plan to read the rest.
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BasicallyAnybody
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Oh, the stories are great, but what really tickles me about this volume is that in the real first edition, the author's name is spelled "Herman Meville" on the title page. Library of America pulled those from bookstore shelves as quickly as possible, and put out a false first edition with the page corrected. I have a real first edition. Do you?
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Tsrorst
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Pierre loves his mother like a sister, his sister like a wife, and his ex-fiance like a cousin. Plus two romantic friendships with a male cousin and boyhood friend. This is an insane book, beautifully written, poetic and philosophical, with one of the most sudden, craziest feel bad endings I've seen since Dostoevsky's The Demons. In the last few chapters there is one murder, two suicides, and one death by shock/heartbreak.
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Kenmeina
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I was amazed just how much I loved this collection. Pierre was shockingly good, Israel Potter relatively typical, The Piazza tales well deserve their reputation and both The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd are masterpieces. I think this was about my fifth read of The Confidence-Man and it just gets better (and more complex) with every reading.
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Delriver
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I had to read "Pierre," "The Confidence Man," and various other Melville short stories out of this volume. I really enjoyed some of the stories and I really didn't care for others. Overall, this just reinforced the fact that Moby Dick was Melville's peak and it was all downhill from there.
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Paperwhales
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Pierre - finished 11/26/14

Israel Potter - finished 01/20/15

The Piazza Tales - finished 04/11/16

The Confidence-Man - finished 04/17/17

Uncollected Prose – finished 07/22/18

Billy Budd - finished 01/20/19
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