Herman Melville

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...

American writer Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick in 1851 but it took decades before finally it was regarded as a great American novel, and worthy of its place amongst the greatest texts of humankind. It recounts the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of a whaling ship seeking vengeance on Moby Dick, the white whale that had bitten off Ahab's leg on a previous voyage.

An aging lawyer hires a new copyist to help with his firm's workload, and at first he finds himself pleased with his new employee. Bartleby is quiet, efficient and he doesn't display any of the loud eccentricities of the firm's other two copyists, Nippers and Turkey. But one day, when the lawyer asks Bartleby if he will help him compare copies, Bartleby simply replies, "I would prefer not to." As time goes by and Bartleby's strange refusals multiply,...

The Confidence Man (1857) is a novel by American writer Herman Melville. After the failure of his novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville struggled to find a publisher who would accept his work. When it was published, The Confidence Man was seen as a flawed, unnecessarily complicated novel, and beyond several collections of poetry, it all but ended Melville's career as a professional writer. When Melville's work was...

A young sailor in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy is falsely accused of mutiny in this classic tale of good and evil by the celebrated author of Moby Dick.

England, 1797. Billy Budd, a young sailor aboard the merchant ship Rights-of-Man is conscripted to serve on a Royal Navy warship, the HMS Bellipotent. Innocent and charming despite his stutter, Billy is quickly accepted by the crew—and resented by the

...

A handsome young sailor becomes the victim of a superior officer's intransigence, in this classic legal parable about innocence and evil.

"Inspired by Melville's own experiences on the high seas, this classic adventure tale pits two sailors against an island of cannibals After six months of relentless battering by the turbulent South Pacific, the whaling ship known as the " Dolly " is beginning to resemble a swollen and cracking prison. For Tommo, it's been six months of little to eat but stale biscuits, six months of steady abuse and derision from his shipmates, six months with nothing...

"Herman Melville towers among American writers not only for his powerful novels, but also for the stirring novellas and short stories that flowed from his pen. Two of the most admired of these -- "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno" -- first appeared as magazine pieces and were then published in 1856 as part of a collection of short stories entitled The Piazza Tales. "Bartleby" (also known as "Bartleby the Scrivener") is an intriguing moral allegory set...