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Summary
&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LI&&RBilly Budd and the Piazza Tales&&L/I&&R, by &&LB&&RHerman Melville&&L/B&&R, is part of the &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R &&LI&&R &&L/I&&Rseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R: &&LDIV&&R New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics &&L/I&&Rpulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&LP&&RLargely neglected in his own lifetime, &&LB&&RHerman Melville&&L/B&&R mastered not only the great American novel but also the short story and novella forms. In &&LI&&RBilly Budd and The&&L/I&&R &&LI&&RPiazza Tales&&L/I&&R, Melville reveals an uncanny awareness of the inscrutable nature of reality.&&L/P&&R&&LP&&RPublished posthumously in 1924, &&LI&&RBilly Budd&&L/I&&R is a masterpiece second only to Melville's &&LI&&RMoby-Dick&&L/I&&R. This complex short novel tells the story of "the handsome sailor" Billy who, provoked by a false charge, accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. Unable to defend himself due to a stammer, he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. Although typically ambiguous, &&LI&&RBilly Budd&&L/I&&R is seen by many as a testament to Melville's ultimate reconciliation with the incongruities and injustices of life.&&L/P&&R&&LP&&R&&LI&&RThe Piazza Tales&&L/I&&R (1856) comprises six short stories, including the perpetually popular "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby," a tale of a scrivener who repeatedly distills his mordant criticism of the workplace into the deceptively simple phrase "I would prefer not to." &&L/P&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LSTRONG&&RRobert G. O'Meally&&L/B&&R is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for seventeen years; since 1999 he has been the director of Columbia's Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of &&LI&&RThe Craft of Ralph Ellison&&L/I&&R and &&LI&&RLady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday&&L/I&&R, and the principal writer of &&LI&&RSeeing Jazz&&L/I&&R, the catalog for the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit on jazz painting and literature.&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R
Author Notes
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was born into a seemingly secure, prosperous world, a descendant of prominent Dutch and English families long established in New York State. That security vanished when first, the family business failed, and then, two years later, in young Melville's thirteenth year, his father died. Without enough money to gain the formal education that professions required, Melville was thrown on his own resources and in 1841 sailed off on a whaling ship bound for the South Seas. His experiences at sea during the next four years were to form in part the basis of his best fiction.
Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were partly romance and partly autobiographical travel books set in the South Seas. Both were popular successes, particularly Typee, which included a stay among cannibals and a romance with a South Sea maiden. During the next several years, Melville published three more romances that drew upon his experiences at sea: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both fairly realistic accounts of the sailor's life and depicting the loss of innocence of central characters; and Mardi (1849), which, like the other two books, began as a romance of adventure but turned into an allegorical critique of contemporary American civilization. Moby Dick (1851) also began as an adventure story, based on Melville's experiences aboard the whaling ship. However, in the writing of it inspired in part by conversations with his friend and neighbor Hawthorne and partly by his own irrepressible imagination and reading of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists Melville turned the book into something so strange that, when it appeared in print, many of his readers and critics were dumbfounded, even outraged.
By the mid-1850s, Melville's literary reputation was all but destroyed, and he was obliged to live the rest of his life taking whatever jobs he could find and borrowing money from relatives, who fortunately were always in a position to help him. He continued to write, however, and published some marvelous short fiction pieces Benito Cereno" (1855) and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) are the best. He also published several volumes of poetry, the most important of which was Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), poems of occasionally great power that were written in response to the moral challenge of the Civil War.
His posthumously published work, Billy Budd (1924), on which he worked up until the time of his death, became Melville's last significant literary work, a brilliant short novel that movingly describes a young sailor's imprisonment and death. Melville's reputation, however, rests most solidly on his great epic romance, Moby Dick. It is a difficult as well as a brilliant book, and many critics have offered interpretations of its complicated ambiguous symbolism. Darrel Abel briefly summed up Moby Dick as "the story of an attempt to search the unsearchable ways of God," although the book has historical, political, and moral implications as well.
Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, at age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York, along with his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville.
(Bowker Author Biography)