Mardi, and a Voyage Thither

Herman Melville

The first major novel by Herman Melville. This is a combination of pamphlet and melodrama, ethnics and esoterics, psychology and memoirs, a detective and travel notes, philosophy and poetry, woven into the historical canvas of the mid-19th century. The main character finds himself in a metaphorical world, reflecting the appearance of the countries of the Old and New Worlds in the mirror of the societies of conditional Oceania, where each island has its own prototype or social model.

Moby Dick. or The Whale

Herman Melville

A former schoolteacher famously called Ishmael hero of Moby Dick signs up as sailor on a whaling voyage to cure a bout of depression. On his way to find a ship in Nantucket, he meets Queequeg, a heavily tattooed South Sea Island harpooneer just returned from his latest whaling trip. Ishmael and Queequeg become best buds and roommates almost immediately. Together, they sign up for a voyage on the Pequod, which is just about to start on a three-year expedition to hunt sperm whales.

Omoo. A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas

Herman Melville

At the beginning of the book about the wanderings on the ship. The way Melville describes everything is indescribably delightful. With amazingly alluring tongue, he knows all readers life on board the ship, the relationship between the crew. Later, when the main character and his friend appeared in Tahiti, he describes the life of the islanders, how they spend their daily lives, and how modern civilization comes to them, trying to adjust them to themselves, to remove them from their centuries-old everyday life.

Pierre. Or, The Ambiguities

Herman Melville

In America, in the rich family estate of Saddle Meadows, the Glendinning family leads a luxurious and carefree existence Mrs. Glendinning rotates in the upper circles of local society; her son, Pierre, an athlete and a talented young writer who gained his first fame, is going to marry the lovely Lucy, whom he seems to have a crush on. But an accidental meeting with the mysterious beauty Isabel threatens to destroy Pierres entire happy life, as she opens the veil of gloomy family secret.

The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches

Herman Melville

Smooth reading, very pretty, with graceful irony personifying superstition and fears in the unknown. The Apple Tree Table is a cool little ghost story where rationalistic skeptics were right, and it turns out that there is a mundane explanation. And oddly enough for Melville, at the end there is even a message of pro-Christianity.

The Confidence-Man. His Masquerade

Herman Melville

A post-modern masterpiece; a century ahead of its time. The novel portrays a Canterbury Tales-style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. And the novel itself tests the confidence of the reader as each character slides away beneath the muddy prose waters of the river. Melville introduces characters who change identities so rapidly that the reader is confronted with a portrait of the American frontier as perceived through a series of disguises.

The Piazza Tales

Herman Melville

Melville has a fairly wide range of styles and approaches. Piazza is a Tolkien excursion into a fairyland, but she asks where the real fairyland is actually located. Piazza, a descriptive and sensitively told pastoral story.

Typee. A Peep at Polynesian Life

Herman Melville

Basically, it turns out that the Typee tribe untouched by civilization is children of nature, surrounded by the care and warmth of their native land, spending their easy days in the shade of a palm tree, eating the fruits of breadfruit, bananas and coconuts. Here, Melville begins to compare civilized countries with a clearly backward society and concludes that the former are at a lower stage of development. And the natives with their cannibalism and promiscuity are in many ways more advanced and healthy people in social and psychological terms.