Herman Melville

While 'Moby Dick' is Herman Melville's best known book, 'Billy Budd, Sailor' is considered by many to be his greatest work. Billy, a foundling from Bristol, has an innocence, good looks and a natural charisma that make him popular with the crew. His only physical defect is a stutter which grows worse when under intense emotion. He arouses the antagonism of the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart. Claggart, while not unattractive, seems somehow defective...

Una historia de Wall Street. Ese es el importante subtítulo de esta pequeña pero gran obra de Herman Melville. Leerla es un desborde de emociones contrapuestas que te dejará pensando o todo y nada a la vez, durante varias semanas. Bartleby, uno de los personajes más enigmáticos de la literatura clásica universal, y y con uno de los mensajes más difíciles de descifrar. Varias interpretaciones y estudios literarios lo señalan, desde el precursor...

"The Encantadas" (or Enchanted Isles), is a series of ten descriptive sketches, and a reminiscence from Melville's sailor days revealing the ecologically pristine Galápagos Islands as both enchanting and horrifying. Containing some of Melville's "most memorable prose", The Encantadas were a critical success at a time when Melville's fortunes were down. After publication, the New York Dispatch cited the chapters as universally considered among the...

The truth is, my wife, like all the rest of the world, cares not a fig for my philosophical jabber. Thus wrote Melville in 1856, in the house where he had penned 'Moby-Dick" some six years earlier (Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts). An allegorical tale that reveals a very unsettling home life and professional life for this American genius, who by the time this story was published was nearly forgotten.

Don Benito faltered; then, like some somnambulist suddenly interfered with, vacantly stared at his visitor, and ended by looking down on the deck. He maintained this posture so long, that Captain Delano, almost equally disconcerted, and involuntarily almost as rude, turned suddenly from him, walking forward to accost one of the Spanish seamen for the desired information. But he had hardly gone five paces, when with a sort of eagerness Don Benito invited...

Widely believed to be among Melville's most popular works, "Redburn, His First Voyage" follows the young Wellingborough Redburn on his first journey at sea. A boy just on the verge of manhood, Redburn's decision to become a sailor is apparently at odds with his gentle upbringing, which has made him in many ways unprepared for the hardships of his chosen profession. He is unmercifully initiated into the life of a sailor by his fellow crewmen, a trying...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!' It is the end of the eighteenth century, and the navy recruits the eponymous hero - the 'Handsome Sailor' - to its fleet. Accused of mutinous behaviour, Billy Budd is forced to defend himself, but his fearful, silent response soon gives way to a terrible act of violence. The consequences are disastrous, and...

"Es lunes, aunque no importa –podría ser cualquier otro día laborable–. El abogado y propietario de la oficina, por el bien de todos, designa a cada uno de sus subalternos las tareas que hay que resolver. Tres sencillas palabras, pronunciadas por el último empleado contratado, harán que, desde esos despachos, el mundo comience a tambalearse. Con su «preferiría no hacerlo», Bartleby deja perplejo a todo aquel incapaz de ver más allá de...

Ishmael, un marin agité, s'embarque pour un voyage de chasse à la baleine à bord du Pequod sous le commandement du capitaine Achab, un homme consumé par la vengeance de la légendaire baleine blanche, Moby Dick. Au fur et à mesure que l'équipage s'enfonce dans l'océan vaste et impitoyable, il rencontre le danger, la camaraderie et l'attraction inéluctable du destin. L'obsession d'Ahab les pousse tous vers une confrontation épique qui testera...

A fictionalized account about the revolt on a 19th-century Spanish slavery ship, Benito Cereno was first published in three installments in 1855. Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts, Jr. called the story "an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South." The famous question of what had cast such a shadow upon Cereno was used by American...