The Piazza Tales: Written by Himself [Large Print Edition]

Also included in this volume are 'The Lightning-Rod Man', 'The Bell Tower' and a story written especially for the collection, 'The Piazza'

Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851). His work was almost forgotten during his last thirty years. Herman Melville's writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. He developed a complex, baroque style: the vocabulary is rich and original, a strong sense of rhythm infuses the elaborate sentences, the imagery is often mystical or ironic and the abundance of allusion extends to scripture, myth, philosophy, literature and the visual arts.

It is Melville who establishes the benchmark for what the short story can attain and allows us to set the standards by which all the other great writers of the form can be measured.

Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in his lifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno" along with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands that make up "The Encantadas" and three more short stories: "The Piazza," "The Bell-Tower," and "The Lightning-Rod Man." This new edition places these stories in the context of nineteenth-century debates over slavery, free will and determinism, science and technology, and the nature and value of literary artistry. The stories in The Piazza Tales demonstrate the global range of Melville's cultural and aesthetic concerns, as Melville set his stories in locales ranging from rural western Massachusetts and Wall Street in the United States to the Pacific coast of South America and southern Europe.

This edition is especially concerned with Melville's engagement with both political questions related to slavery and imperialism and aesthetic questions germane to the short story tradition as developed by his near contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

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Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in his lifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, along with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands and three more short stories.