Representative selections, with introduction, bibliography, and notes, by Willard Thorp

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.