Shares expert guidelines on how to read and appreciate Herman Melville's classic work, offering insight into its history, characters, and themes while explaining its literary relevance in the modern world.

The young hero jumps ship with a mate and spends four months with the islanders known as Typee - the 'eaters of men.'

Based on Melville's own experiences, the novel explores the fascinating and often harrowing world of a naval fighting ship, the Neversink. The ship becomes for Melville a microcosm of America itself; its hierarchy, social divisions, and cruel practices suggest larger injustices, including slavery.

Includes a brief biography of the author, thematic and structural analysis of the work, critical views, and an index of themes and ideas.

Cheerful, hardwork, and handsome, Billy is pressed into naval service aboard a British ship during the Napoleonic wars. The innocent and loveable young man quickly wins the hearts of all his comrades, save one: Claggart, the implacably bitter master-at-arms, who falsely accuses Billy of inciting a mutiny. Rich in the ambiguities, Herman Mellville's haunting parable of the clash between good and evil raises thought-provoking issues related to the conflict...

"The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from...

Sounding the Whale is Christopher Sten's comprehensive account of his own close encounter with Moby-Dick. Originally a long, self-contained chapter in The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel, just published by the Kent State University Press, this chapter-by-chapter study of Moby-Dick evolved as a book within a book. Sten argues that Melville not only was familiar with the traditional forms of narrative but that he refined...

Brings together Melville's four famous late novellas.

On an island in the Sea of Cortez, a solitary young woman has a special love and understanding for the sea.

Herman Melville's epic tale of obsession has all the ingredients of a first rate drama--fascinating characters in solitude and society, battles between good and evil, a thrilling chase to the death--and yet its allusions, digressions, and sheer scope can prove daunting to even the most intrepid reader. George Cotkin's Dive Deeper provides both a guide to the novel and a record of its dazzling cultural train. It supplies easy-to-follow plot points...