Pierre; or The Ambiguities

Pierre Glendinning, a rich, idealistic young man in the country of upstate New York, lives happily with his proud mother and is engaged to the gentle Lucy Tartan. Then he meets Isabel, a dark, mysterious young woman who claims to be his father's illegitimate daughter. To protect her and his father's memory, Pierre pretends to marry her, loses his inheritance and goes to New York City to live by his writing, with tragic results.

Herman Melville published the novel in 1852, after Moby-Dick, and it was a disaster: one newspaper headline read 'Herman Melville Crazy'. Modern readers find in it a strange, daring study of idealism, family secrets and the life of a writer. Read Melville's Moby-Dick and Typee.

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York to a family ruined when he was a boy. At twenty he went to sea, sailed on a whaler to the Pacific, deserted in the Marquesas Islands and turned the adventure into Typee, a bestseller that made him famous at twenty-seven.

His ambitions grew with each book, and Moby-Dick, published in 1851, was misunderstood and sold poorly. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing poems and the stories Bartleby, the Scrivener and Billy Budd, and died almost forgotten; he was rediscovered as a great writer in the 1920s.