The gripping tale of a handsome and charismatic young sailor who runs afoul of his ship’s master-at-arms, is falsely accused of inciting a mutiny, and hung, Billy Budd, Sailor is often treated as a masterpiece, a canonical work. But that assessment is at least partly founded on the assumption that the story was complete and ready for publication when it was left among the manuscripts on Melville’s writing desk when he died in 1891. As Hershel Parker has pointed out, “It is a wonderfully teachable story—as long as it is not taught as a finished, complete, coherent, and totally interpretable work of art.” Furthering Melville’s goal of getting his last literary projects into print, even in their imperfect forms, this last volume in the edition presents the poetry and prose that Melville was unable to finish, his sometimes ineffectual, sometimes heroic purposes betrayed by death.

These unfinished writings include, besides Billy Budd, two projected volumes containing poems and prose pieces, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope; three prose pieces, “Rammon,” “Story of Daniel Orme,” and “Under the Rose”; and some three dozen poems of varying lengths. Some of these pieces were surely composed late in Melville’s career, during his retirement, but others may date to as early as the 1850s. Except for Billy Budd, many of these works have not been readily available in reliable texts, when available at all.

This volume, the result of the editors’ meticulous study of the manuscripts, offers new reading texts, with significant corrections of words, phrases, and titles, the inclusion of heretofore unpublished lines of verse, and the return to their original locations of the two poems, “The Enviable Isles” and “Pausilippo,” that Melville had extracted for use in John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891). Hershel Parker’s Historical Note traces how these writings fit into the trajectory of Melville’s career, and the rest of the Editorial Appendix presents the scholarly evidence and decisions made in creating the reading texts. As a whole, the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, now complete in fifteen volumes, offers for the first time the total body of Melville’s extant writings in a critical text, faithful to his intentions.

An evaluation of the importance of textual criticism in evaluation of important literary works, based on his study of important American literary works by authors such as James, Crane, and Mailer.

Unique among Melville's works, Israel Potter was the author's only historical novel, presuming to offer the life history of Revolutionary War figure Israel Potter--based on Potter's own obscure narrative Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter--and featuring characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen. In offering the manuscript to his publisher, Melville assured him, "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." This came as a relief, for his previous novel, Pierre, had shocked readers and brought down universal castigation.

This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces.

The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

“Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber?” the London John Bull remarked in October of 1851. And yet, the reviewer went on, “few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod's whaling expedition.” A decade and a half before surprising the world with a book of Civil war poetry, Melville was already confident of what was “poetic” in his prose. As Hershel Parker demonstrates in this book, Melville was steeped in poetry long before he called himself a poet. 

Here Parker, the dean of Melville studies, gives a compelling, in-depth account of how one of America’s greatest writers grew into the vocation of a poet. His work corrects two of the most pernicious misconceptions about Melville perpetuated by earlier critics: that he repudiated fiction writing after Pierre, and that he hadn’t begun writing poetry (let alone had a book of poems ready for publication) as early as 1860. In clearing up these misapprehensions, Parker gives a thorough and thoroughly involving account of Melville’s development as a poet. Parker demonstrates for the first time just how crucial poetry was to Melville from childhood to old age, especially its re-emergence in his life after 1849. Drawing on Melville's shrewd annotations of great British poets and on his probing, skeptical engagement with commentaries on poetry (particularly by the great Scots reviewers), Parker paints a richly textured portrait of a hitherto unseen side of Herman Melville.

This edition of Moby-Dick, released in honor of the book's sesquicentennial, is the authoritative text of one of the world's great adventure stories. A crew of whalers sets out in pursuit of a fierce white whale. Their names ring through the canon of American literature: Ishmael, the narrator; Queequeg, a South Seas harpooner; Starbuck, the sober and serious chief mate; and above all Captain Ahab, part-Faust and part-Job, obsessed with the destruction of his foe.

This text of Moby-Dick is an Approved Text of the Center for Scholarly Editions (Modern Language Association of America).

Redburn is a fictional narrative of a boy's first voyage, based loosely on Melville's own first voyage to and from Liverpool in 1839. Hastily composed and little esteemed by its author, Redburn was more highly thought of by his critics, who saw it regaining the ground of popular sea stories like Typee and Omoo.

Melville so disliked the novel that he submitted it to his publisher without polishing it. This scholarly edition corrects a number of errors that have persisted in subsequent editions. Based on collations of the editions published during his lifetime, it incorporates corrections made in the English edition and emendations made by the present editors.

As with all the books in the Northwestern-Newberry series, this edition of Redburn is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

Almost from the time of its publication early in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic in the literature of travel and adventure. From the beginning, however, there have been problems with the text. Due to disparities between the American and English editions, and revisions Melville had to make at his publisher's request concerning its racy style and attitude toward missionaries, the book has circulated in two versions.

This scholarly edition is based on collations of all editions published during his lifetime, incorporating many authorial readings that have often been omitted and some that have been misprinted in all previous editions. This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

Almost from the time of its publication early in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic in the literature of travel and adventure. From the beginning, however, there have been problems with the text. Due to disparities between the American and English editions, and revisions Melville had to make at his publisher's request concerning its racy style and attitude toward missionaries, the book has circulated in two versions.

This scholarly edition is based on collations of all editions published during his lifetime, incorporating many authorial readings that have often been omitted and some that have been misprinted in all previous editions. This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).