Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, became a bestseller), but after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime.
Bartleby, The Scrivener
Read by Bob Neufeld
Running Time:1:55:26 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): General Fiction
"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by Herman Melville. The story first appeared, anonymously, in Putnam's Magazine in two parts. The first part appeared in November 1853, with the conclusion published in December 1853. It was reprinted in Melville's The Piazza Tales in 1856 with minor textual alterations. The work is said to have been inspired, in part, by Melville's reading of Emerson, and some have pointed to specific parallels to Emerson's essay, "The Transcendentalist." The story has been adapted twice: once in 1970, starring Paul Scofield, and again in 2001, starring Crispin Glover.
Benito Cereno
Read by Noel Fidian, Alwpoe, James K. White, Bill Mosley, Iris McLeod and Guero
Running Time:3:53:17 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, Literary Fiction, Nautical & Marine Fiction
On an island off the coast of Chile, Captain Amaso Delano, sailing an American sealer, sees the San Dominick, a Spanish slave ship, in obvious distress. Capt. Delano boards the San Dominick, providing needed supplies, and tries to learn from her aloof and disturbed captain, Benito Cereno, the story of how this ship came to be where she is. Dealing with racism, the slave trade, madness, the tension between representation and reality, and featuring at least one unreliable narrator, Melville's novella has both captivated and frustrated critics for decades.
Billy Budd
Read by ScientificMethodist
Running Time:03:06:59 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, Literary Fiction, Nautical & Marine Fiction
Young naive sailor Billy Budd is impressed into military service with the British navy in the 1790s, framed for conspiracy to mutiny, summarily convicted in a drum-head court martial, and hanged. Billy Budd is the final published work by Herman Melville, discovered in his personal papers three decades after his death.
Mardi Vol. 1
Read in English by Anonymous and Gail Timmerman Vaughan.
Running Time:10:46:58 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, Nautical & Marine Fiction
"Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience...This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi"
Mardi Vol. 2
Read by James K. White
Running Time:12:49:59 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, Nautical & Marine Fiction
Mardi is Melville's first purely fictional work. In it he contemplates man's beliefs, and questions whether or not one faith has value over another--or is it all simply a sham? Mardi is a poetically existential analysis of religious truths as told through the protagonist's allegorical wanderings across the South Pacific. But is this all that Mardi is?
Moby Dick, or the Whale
Read by Stewart Wills
Running Time:24:37:50 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, Nautical & Marine Fiction
Few things, even in literature, can really be said to be unique — but Moby Dick is truly unlike anything written before or since. The novel is nominally about the obsessive hunt by the crazed Captain Ahab of the book’s eponymous white whale. But interspersed in that story are digressions, paradoxes, philosophical riffs on whaling and life, and a display of techniques so advanced for its time that some have referred to the 1851 Moby Dick as the first “modern” novel.
Omoo:A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
Read by TriciaG
Running Time:11:30:44 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, Culture & Heritage Fiction, Nautical & Marine Fiction
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas is Herman Melville's sequel to Typee, and, as such, was also autobiographical. After leaving Nuku Hiva, the main character ships aboard a whaling vessel which makes its way to Tahiti, after which there is a mutiny and the majority of the crew are imprisoned on Tahiti. The book follows the actions of the narrator as he explores Tahiti and remarks on their customs and way of life.
Many sources incorrectly assert that Omoo is based on Melville's stay in the Marquesas. The novel is, in fact, exclusively based on his experiences in the Society Islands.
Pierre, or The Ambiguities
Read by Nadu Plants and Jim Locke
Running Time:17:10:42 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Published 1800 -1900
The life of a young heir, Pierre is altered when he meets a mysterious woman who claims to be his sister.
Redburn:His First Voyage
Read by James K. White
Running Time:12:36:48 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Nautical & Marine Fiction
Melville wrote of some of his earliest experiences at sea in the story of Wellingborough Redburn, a wet-behind-the-ears youngster whose head was filled with dreams of foreign travel and adventure. In Redburn, the protagonist enlists for a stint as a seaman aboard Highlander, a merchant ship running between New York and London. As with many of Melville's works, this one is as much about class and race as it is about the sea.
Selections from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
Read by Students of Clark University
Running Time: 02:24:22 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Single author, War & Military
Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The “aspects” to which he refers in the title are as diverse as “the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance.” Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjectivities and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville’s Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidoscopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America.
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
Read by M.B.
Running Time:10:55:58 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Travel Fiction, Satire
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was the last major novel by Herman Melville, the American writer and author of Moby-Dick. Published on April 1, 1857 (presumably the exact day of the novel's setting), The Confidence-Man was Melville's tenth major work in eleven years. The novel portrays a Canterbury Tales-style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Melville's Moby-Dick and "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a precursor to 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.
The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles
Read by James K. White
Running Time:2:33:46 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): General Fiction, Short Stories
The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles is a novella by American author Herman Melville. First published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854, it consists of ten philosophical "Sketches" on the Encantadas, or Galápagos Islands. It was collected in The Piazza Tales in 1856. The Encantadas was to become the most critically successful of that collection. All of the stories are replete with symbolism reinforcing the cruelty of life on the Encantadas.
The Piazza Tales
Read by John Greenman
Running Time:09:45:28 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Culture & Heritage Fiction, Humorous Fiction, Single Author Collections
A collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published in May 1856. Except for the newly written title story, "The Piazza," all of the stories had appeared in Putnam's Monthly between 1853 and 1855. The collection includes what has long been regarded as three of Melville's most important achievements in the genre of short fiction, "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", and "The Encantadas", his sketches of the Galápagos Islands. (Billy Budd, arguably his greatest piece of short fiction, would remain unpublished in his lifetime.) One should note that the era's prevalent racism occasionally surfaces, as in describing blacks as "indisputable inferiors", to be found in "Benito Cereno".
Typee
Read by Michael Scherer
Running Time:11:42:41 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, Nautical & Marine Fiction
Typee is Herman Melville's first book, recounting his experiences after having jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands in 1842, and becoming a captive of a cannibal island tribe. It was an immediate success in America and England, and was Melville's most popular work during his lifetime. It was not until the end of the 1930's that it was surpassed in popularity by Moby Dick, more than thirty years after his death. The story provoked harsh criticism for its condemnation of missionary efforts in the Pacific Islands. Many sought to discredit the book, claiming that it was a work of fiction, but this criticism ended when the events it described were corroborated by Melville's fellow castaway, Richard T. Greene, who appears in the story as the character Toby
White Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War
Read by James K. White
Running Time:17:30:58 in 1 MP3 Audio CD
Genre(s): Nautical & Marine Fiction
This is a tale based on Melville's experiences aboard the USS United States from 1843 to 1844. It comments on the harsh and brutal realities of service in the US Navy at that time, but beyond this the narrator has created for the reader graphic symbols for class distinction, segregation and slavery aboard this microcosm of the world, the USS Neversink.