Collected in this volume are "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno" and "Billy Budd" - presented in the best texts available, those published during Herman Melville's lifetime and corrected by the author. Each text has been carefully edited and annotated for student readers. As his writing refle[...]

This classic story of high adventure, manic obsession, and metaphysical speculation was Melville's masterpiece. The tale of Captain Ahab's frantic pursuit of the cunning and notorious white whale Moby Dick, is packed with drama, and draws heavily on the author's own experiences on the high seas. Thi[...]

Guardaba la pata de marfil y cogiéndose a un obenque, el capitán se sostenía muy tieso, mirando fijamente por encima de la proa cabeceante del buque. Había en la dirección fija e imperturbable de aquella mirada una entereza infinita, una voluntad resuelta e inflexible.[...]

As the Pequod spirals the globe in search of Moby Dick, the mythical white whale of the Southern oceans, Ishmael and crew must deal with the obsessive revenge of Captain Ahab.[...]

Call me Ishmael. And so begins one the most famous journeys in literature - the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, with its scarred Captain Ahab and a universe of compelling crewmen, including the islander Queequeg, the harpooneer Fedallah, the mate Elijah, and Ishmael himself. Ishmael quickly learn[...]

Stung by the difficult reception of Moby Dick, Herman Melville became obsessed with the difficulties of communicating his vision to readers. His sense of isolation lies at the heart of these later works. "Billy Budd, Sailor" is a classic confrontation between good and evil, and the story of an innoc[...]

Stung by the difficult reception of Moby Dick, Herman Melville became obsessed with the difficulties of communicating his vision to readers. His sense of isolation lies at the heart of these later works. "Billy Budd, Sailor" is a classic confrontation between good and evil, and the story of an innoc[...]

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Confidence - Man and Billy Budd, Sailor" by Herman Melville. 'Life is a pic-nic en costume; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool'. In "The Confidence-Man", Melville's unnerving and hallucinatory[...]

A century and a half after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more [...]

In part, "Moby-Dick" is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its autho[...]

'Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.' So wrote Melville of Billy Budd, Sailor, among the greatest of his works and, in its richness and ambiguity, among the most problematic. As the critic E. L. Grant Watson writes, 'In this short history of the impressment and hanging of [...]