Author
Herman Melville
1819–1891 3 volumes Adventure & the Sea
The life
Herman Melville was an American novelist who shipped out on a whaler at twenty-one, jumped ship in the Marquesas and lived among islanders — the adventures that made his early books popular. Moby-Dick baffled readers and ended his career; he spent nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks and died forgotten. His rediscovery came in the 1920s, thirty years after his death.
Where to start
Omoo
320 pages — the shortest way into Melville, not the greatest.
It was the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that we made good our escape from the bay.
Paintings from these volumes
In the library