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Picking up where Typee left off, the narrator, rescued from the valley of the cannibals, joins the crew of an Australian whaler, the Julia, a leaky, run-down…
Picking up where Typee left off, the narrator, rescued from the valley of the cannibals, joins the crew of an Australian whaler, the Julia, a leaky, run-down ship with a sick captain and a drunken mate. When the crew refuses to sail any further, they are thrown into a calabooza, a jail, on Tahiti, and the narrator and his eccentric friend Doctor Long Ghost wander the islands of Tahiti and Eimeo as beachcombers, observing the islanders, the missionaries and the European sailors.
Context and significance
Herman Melville (1819–1891) drew on his own adventures of 1842, including a real mutiny, and published the book in 1847 as a sequel to Typee; 'omoo' is a Polynesian word for a wanderer from island to island. Read Melville's Moby-Dick.
About the author
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.