Novels ↙ | 11 |
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Articles ↙ | 8 |
Stories ↙ | 17 |
Collections ↙ | 5 |
Unfinished works ↙ | 1 |
References and footnotes |
The bibliography of Herman Melville includes magazine articles, book reviews, other occasional writings, and 15 books. Of these, seven books were published between 1846 and 1853, seven more between 1853 and 1891, and one in 1924. Melville was 26 when his first book was published, and his last book was not released until 33 years after his death. At the time of his death he was on the verge of completing the manuscript for his first novel in three decades, Billy Budd , and had accumulated several large folders of unpublished verse.
The year 1853 saw a physical disaster that renders the books published by him in America prior to that date even more scarce today than would normally have been the case. At one o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, December 10, 1853, the establishment of Melville's publishers Harper Brothers was completely destroyed by fire, reportedly caused by a plumber throwing a lit candle into a bucket of camphene, which he mistook for water. The fire burned Harper's stock of Melville's unsold books, which consisted of Typee, 185; Omoo, 276; Mardi, 491; Redburn, 296; White Jacket, 292; Moby-Dick, 297; and Pierre, 494. Mardi and Pierre, Melville's two least popular books, had the largest number of unsold copies burned. [1] Isle of the Cross is a possible lost work that was rejected for publication in 1853. That year was also the beginning of the long period of unpopularity precipitated by the appearance of Pierre in 1852 and exacerbated by the publication of The Confidence-Man in 1857. Melville then turned his attention to poetry, to which he devoted more years than he had to fiction. [2]
A Melville revival that began in the 1920s led to the reprinting of many of his works, which had gone out of print in the United States. Raymond Weaver, Melville's first biographer, edited a 16-volume edition for the London publisher Constable, which included the first publication of Billy Budd. [3] In 1926, Moby-Dick was among the first titles in the newly founded Modern Library series. Beginning in 1948, independent publisher Walter Hendricks recruited scholars to edit annotated editions of Melville's works, beginning with a volume of his poetry. [4] Produced under the general editorship of Howard P. Vincent, the series was originally projected to include 14 volumes but in the end only 7 appeared. [5]
In the 1960s, Northwestern University Press, in alliance with the Newberry Library and the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, established ongoing publication runs of Melville's various titles. [6] The aim of the editors, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, was to present unmodernized "critical texts" which represented "as nearly as possible the author's intentions." [7] The editors adopted as "copy text" either the author's fair copy manuscript or the first printing based on it, which were then collated against any further printings in Melville's lifetime, since he might have made corrections or changes. In the case of Moby-Dick, for instance, after collating the American and British editions from the various printings, the editors adopted 185 revisions and corrections from the English edition and incorporated 237 emendations made by the editors. The "Editorial Appendixes" for each volume included an "Historical Note" on composition and publication, an extensive account of the editorial process, a list of emendations and changes, as well as related documents. [7]
Melville's lifetime earnings from his first seven books (over a period of 41 years, from 1846 to 1887) amounted to $10,444.53, of which $5,966.40 came from American publishers and $4,478.13 from British. The bestselling title in the United States was Typee (with 9,598 copies). The book that earned Melville the most in the United States was Omoo ($1,719.78). [8]
Title | Date | First publisher | Notes |
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Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life | 1846 | John Murray | Murray purchased the English rights to print 1000 copies for £100. It first appeared in two parts in Murray's Home and Colonial Library , Part I, February 26, 1846; Part II, April 1, 1846. Four thousand copies of the first edition of the book were printed. The American rights were purchased by Wiley & Putnam after John Murray had agreed to publish the book in England, so that the credit of having first recognized Melville belongs to Murray's London publishing house. It appeared in book form in 1846 simultaneously in New York and London, being one of the first works to be published in this manner. The Sequel, containing "The Story of Toby", was written in July, 1846, and incorporated in the Revised Edition published in the same year. Extracts from the Sequel were also published prior to its appearance in book form. In England, John Murray paid an additional £50 for the Sequel, which was first printed as a small pamphlet in an edition of 1250 copies, and subsequently incorporated in the book. Reprinted:
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Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas | 1847 | John Murray | The manuscript was written in 1846, and the book was published in March, 1847. In England, John Murray paid £150 for the copyright. Together with Typee, Omoo was one of the earliest works to be published simultaneously in New York and London. The first English edition consisted of 4000 copies. The Harper Brothers published in New York the same year. In their catalog for 1847 the book was advertised: "Muslin $1.25, paper $1.00." In 1849 Harper advertised: "In two parts 50 cents each, or complete in muslin gilt $1.25." Reprinted:
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Mardi: And a Voyage Thither | 1849 | Richard Bentley | The novel appeared in two volumes on March 16, 1849, in London (1000 copies), and on April 14, 1849, in New York in three volumes. It was the first Melville book published in England by Bentley. Raymond Weaver stated that up to February 22, 1850, 2154 copies were sold. Reprinted:
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Redburn: His First Voyage | 1849 | Harper & Brothers | The manuscript was written in New York during the summer of 1849. The book appeared on August 18, 1849, in New York, and on September 29, 1849, in London (750 copies). Weaver stated that up to February 22, 1850, 4011 copies were sold. Reprinted:
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White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War | 1850 | Richard Bentley | The manuscript was written in New York City during the summer of 1849. In November of that year Melville went to London to dispose of it. Richard Bentley offered £200 for the English rights to print 1000 copies. The manuscript was refused by Murray, Colbour, and Moxon. Finally, in December, Bentley confirmed his previous offer, and accepted the manuscript for publication at the end of March, 1850 (1000 copies). The American Harpers edition came after the English. Reprinted:
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Moby-Dick; or, The Whale | 1851 | Richard Bentley | The manuscript was written at Arrowhead, Massachusetts, in 1850–1851 and was first published in October, 1851. In England Richard Bentley agreed to pay £150 for the first 1000 copies, and half profits thereafter. The American edition (Harpers: 1 volume) is subsequent to the English (3 volumes, 500 copies) and contained thirty-five passages omitted from the English edition. The published price was $1.50. Reprinted:
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Pierre; or, The Ambiguities | 1852 | Harper & Brothers | The manuscript was written at Arrowhead, Massachusetts, from late 1851 through early 1852 and was first published in August, 1852. Copies issued in England in November of that year consist of the American sheets, with a cancel title = Pierre : Or The Ambiguities. By Herman Melville. London:Sampson Low Son and Co., 47 Ludgate Hill. 1852. [9] |
Isle of the Cross | 1853 | Unpublished | Rejected by Harper & Brothers in June 1853 and since lost or destroyed. [10] |
Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile | 1855 | G. P. Putnam & Co. | Published in April 1855, by Putnam, having previously appeared serially in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, July 1854 – March 1855.) A pirated edition was published under the title The Refugee in Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1865. |
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade | 1857 | Dix, Edwards & Co. | Published in April, 1857. |
Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) | 1924 | Constable | Edited by Raymond Weaver. Published posthumously as Billy Budd, Foretopman, part of a sixteen volume edition of Melville's Complete Works for the London publisher. A second text, F. Barron Freeman Ed., was published in 1948, as Melville's Billy Budd by the Harvard University Press. In 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., established what is now considered the text closest to Melville's intentions; published by the University of Chicago Press as Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). |
The publication dates of Melville's stories in no way correspond to their dates of composition; with editorial considerations, such as length vs. amount of space available, usually determining when they would appear. The Piazza Tales was the only collection of Melville's stories published under his direct supervision. The volume sold slowly in spite of generally favorable notices. Its publishers, Dix & Edwards, dissolved their partnership in 1857 and, it appears, paid the author no royalties on either this book or their other published title of his, The Confidence Man. The plates were put up for sale at publishers' auction but attracted no bidders. As one editor commented, "no one would risk a dollar on Melville." [12]
The plates were subsequently sold for scrap. In 1922, during the Melville revival, there was a complete resetting of the book for its publication in the Constable edition of Melville's Complete Works. That same year saw the Princeton University Press issue a collection of the remaining known stories under the title The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches. The final two stories in the list were discovered in the box turned over to biographer Raymond Weaver by Melville's granddaughter (the same box which yielded Billy Budd) and appeared in the final Constable volume titled Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. [13]
Title | Publication date | First published in | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
"Bartleby, the Scrivener" | November–December 1853 | Putnam's Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Piazza Tales (1856) |
"Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" | December 1853 | Harper's New Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches (1922) by Princeton University Press, which includes the essay, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850), and contains an introductory note by Henry Chapin. Internet Archive has four versions of the scanned book. [14] |
"The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" | March–May 1854 | Putnam's Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Piazza Tales. Melville received a monthly payment of $50 for each of the three installments for a total of $150. [15] He received no additional payment from the Piazza Tales because the collection never generated any royalties. [16] |
"Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs" | June 1854 | Harper's New Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches |
"The Happy Failure" | July 1854 | Harper's New Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches |
"The Lightning-Rod Man" | August 1854 | Putnam's Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Piazza Tales |
"The Fiddler" | September 1854 | Harper's New Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches |
"The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" | April 1855 | Harper's New Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches |
"The Bell-Tower" | August 1855 | Putnam's Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Piazza Tales |
"Benito Cereno" | October–December 1855 | Putnam's Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Piazza Tales |
"Jimmy Rose" | November 1855 | Harper's New Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches |
"The 'Gees" | March 1856 | Harper's New Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches |
"I and My Chimney" | March 1856 | Putnam's Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches |
"The Apple-Tree Table" | May 1856 | Putnam's Monthly Magazine | Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches |
"The Piazza" | 1856 | The Piazza Tales | The only story specifically written for the collection |
"The Two Temples" | 1924 | Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces | Originally rejected by Harper's because it might offend religious sensibilities, [17] it was subsequently printed from manuscript as a part of Constable's Works, Raymond Weaver editor [13] |
"Daniel Orme" | 1924 | Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces | First printed in London, Volume 13 of Constable's Works [18] |
Melville's reputation as a poet rose dramatically in the late 20th century. After the disastrous publication of The Confidence-Man in 1857, Melville turned to the writing of poetry. Virtually ignored by the public and scorned by reviewers, he nevertheless persevered in this endeavor for the next 30 years. Early biographers conveyed the perception of Melville as a novelist who dabbled unsuccessfully in verse. Despite early claims for him as one of the three best American poets before 1900, [19] histories of American poetry for many years all but ignored him. The neglect was partly because until the Northwestern-Newberry edition, the poetry was available only in incomplete "complete" editions, selections, reprints, and editions of individual titles—most of these out of print, few of them textually reliable, and all of them together falling well short of completeness. "That Melville was a poet only in prose is a truth almost universally acknowledged among his critics, one guaranteed to endure as long as the poems remain unavailable in a complete, reliable edition." [20]
In July 2009 Northwestern-Newberry released Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville Vol. 11 the most complete collection to date, containing substantial scholarly notes on individual poems. The final volume (12), Billy Budd and Other Later Manuscripts contains the unpublished poems. [21] The fact remains that Melville wrote fiction for 11 years, poetry for over 30. Although it is true he wrote more prose than poetry, the same can be said of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot both of whom wrote less verse than Melville did. With Clarel he wrote one of the longest poems in the English language. If one includes the poems contained in his novels his entire poetic oeuvre approaches the size of Lord Byron's or Robert Browning's.
Title | Date | First publisher | Notes |
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Poems | 1860 | Unpublished | Melville tried to have his early collected poems printed in 1860, offering them to two publishers who rejected the work. The contents of the volume were then lost or dispersed into later works. [23] |
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War | 1866 | Harper Bros. | 1200 copies were printed of which only 486 were sold by February 13, 1868. In the seven years that followed, only eleven additional copies were sold. [24] Published price: $1.75. The book was not issued in England. Melville states that "with few exceptions, the pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond..." Of the poems included in this volume, the following had already appeared in magazines:
The work was Melville's last commercially funded publication of any sort. [20] He lost $400 on the volume. |
Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land | 1876 | G. P. Putnam's Sons | 2 volumes; published price $3.00. The book was not issued in England. Published in July 1876 at the expense of Melville's uncle, Peter Gansevoort. The manuscript had been in existence for some time. [1] |
John Marr and Other Sailors | 1888 | The De Vinne Press | The volume contains 19 poems. The edition was privately printed and limited to 25 copies. [1] Princeton University press issued an edition in 1922 edited by Henry Chapin. [25] |
Timoleon | 1891 | The Caxton Press | The volume contains 43 poems, was privately printed and limited to 25 copies. |
The following were first published in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, Howard P. Vincent Ed. (Chicago 1947):
The following essays were uncollected during Melville's lifetime:
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.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is American writer Herman Melville's first book, published in 1846, when Melville was 26 years old. Considered a classic in travel and adventure literature, the narrative is based on Melville's experiences on the island Nuku Hiva in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands in 1842, supplemented with imaginative reconstruction and research from other books. The title comes from the valley of Taipivai, once known as Taipi.
Billy Budd, Sailor , also known as Billy Budd, Foretopman, is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by critics as a masterpiece when a hastily transcribed version was finally published in 1924, it quickly took its place as a classic second only to Moby-Dick among Melville's works. Billy Budd is a "handsome sailor" who strikes and inadvertently kills his false accuser, Master-at-arms John Claggart. The ship's Captain, Edward Vere, recognizes Billy's lack of intent, but claims that the law of mutiny requires him to sentence Billy to be hanged.
White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War is the fifth book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1850. The book is based on the author's fourteen months' service in the United States Navy, aboard the frigate USS Neversink.
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas is the second book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1847, and a sequel to his first South Seas narrative Typee, also based on the author's experiences in the South Pacific. After leaving the island of Nuku Hiva, the main character ships aboard a whaling vessel that makes its way to Tahiti, after which there is a mutiny and a third of the crew are imprisoned on Tahiti. In 1949, the narrative was adapted into the exploitation film Omoo-Omoo, the Shark God.
Redburn: His First Voyage is the fourth book by the American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1849. The book is semi-autobiographical and recounts the adventures of a refined youth among coarse and brutal sailors and the seedier areas of Liverpool. Melville wrote Redburn in less than ten weeks. While one scholar describes it as "arguably his funniest work", scholar F. O. Matthiessen calls it "the most moving of its author's books before Moby-Dick".
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is the seventh book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The novel, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendinning; his widowed mother; Glendinning Stanley, his cousin; Lucy Tartan, his fiancée; and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half-sister. According to scholar Henry A. Murray, in writing Pierre Melville "purposed to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" rather than to experiment and incidentally work some personal experience into the novel.
Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville, a fictionalized account about the revolt on a Spanish slave ship captained by Don Benito Cereno, first published in three installments in Putnam's Monthly in 1855. The tale, slightly revised, was included in his short story collection The Piazza Tales that appeared in May 1856. According to scholar Merton M. Sealts Jr., the story is "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 author Ralph Ellison as an epigraph to his 1952 novel Invisible Man, excluding Cereno's answer, "The negro." Over time, Melville's story has been "increasingly recognized as among his greatest achievements".
The Piazza Tales is a collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June. Except for the newly written title story, "The Piazza," all of the stories had appeared in Putnam's Monthly between 1853 and 1855. The collection includes what have long been regarded as three of Melville's most important achievements in the genre of short fiction, "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", and "The Encantadas", his sketches of the Galápagos Islands.
Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism, Chicago regional studies, African American intellectual history, theater and performance studies, and fiction. Parneshia Jones is director of the press. It is a member of the Association of University Presses.
"The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles", is a novella by American author Herman Melville. First published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854, it consists of eleven philosophical "Sketches" on the Galápagos Islands, then frequently known as the "Enchanted Islands" from the treacherous winds and currents around them. It was collected in The Piazza Tales in 1856. The Encantadas was a success with the critics and contains some of Melville's "most memorable prose".
"Isle of the Cross" is a possible unpublished and lost work by Herman Melville, which would have been his eighth book, coming after the commercial and critical failures of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). Melville biographer Hershel Parker suggests that the work, perhaps a novel, perhaps a story, was what had been known as the "story of Agatha," completed around May 1853. He further suggests that finishing the work showed that Melville had not, as many biographers argued, been discouraged and turned away from fiction.
Hershel Parker is an American professor of English and literature, noted for his research into the works of Herman Melville. Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware. He is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and the General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, which, with the publication of volume 13, "Billy Budd, Sailor" and Other Uncompleted Writings, is now (2017) complete in fifteen volumes. Parker is the author of a two-volume biography of Herman Melville published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Parker also edited the first ever one-volume edition of Melville's complete poetry, Herman Melville: Complete Poems, published by the Library of America in 2019.
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850) is an essay and critical review by Herman Melville of the short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1846. Published pseudonymously by "a Virginian spending July in Vermont", it appeared in The Literary World magazine in two issues: August 17 and August 24, 1850. It has been called the "most famous literary manifesto of the American nineteenth century."
George Thomas Tanselle is an American textual critic, bibliographer, and book collector, especially known for his work on Herman Melville. He was Vice President of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation from 1978 to 2006.
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is the first book of poetry of the American author Herman Melville. Published by Harper & Brothers of New York in 1866, the volume is dedicated "To the Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand Who in the War For the Maintenance of the Union Fell Devotedly Under the Flag of Their Fathers" and its 72 poems deal with the battles and personalities of the American Civil War and their aftermath. Also included are Notes and a Supplement in prose in which Melville sets forth his thoughts on how the Post-war Reconstruction should be carried out.
John Marr and Other Sailors is a volume of poetry published by Herman Melville in 1888. Melville published twenty-five copies at his own expense, indicating that they were intended for family and friends. Henry Chapin wrote in an introduction to a reprint that "Melville's loveable freshness of personality is everywhere in evidence, in the voice of a true poet".
Harrison Mosher Hayford was a scholar of American literature, most prominently of Herman Melville, a book-collector, and a textual editor. He taught at Northwestern University from 1942 until his retirement in 1986. He was a leading figure in the post-World War II generation of Melville scholars who mounted the Melville Revival. He was General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville published by Northwestern University Press, which established reliable texts for all of Melville's works by using techniques of textual criticism.
Walter E. Bezanson was a scholar and critic of American literature best known for his studies of Herman Melville and contributions to the Melville revival that restored the writer to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s. Bezanson's research and editorial work rescued from neglect Mevlille's unappreciated epic poem, Clarel, and he published essays on Moby-Dick that were widely cited and reprinted.
Pursuing Melville 1940-1980.