But like some over-educated Icarus, his soaring flights of gorgeous prose are always followed by plunges into tedious pedantry. One can feel, on every page, Melville straining to write something Miltonic, Shakespearean, even Biblical in its reach and power. It is somehow both brilliant and overly-ambitious. The paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids -įor me, Moby Dick is compelling for its flaws as much as its genius. In his introduction Frederick Busch discusses Melville's preoccupation with his "correspondence with the world," his quarrel with silence, and why fiction was, for Melville,"a matter of life and death." The other selections here-"Bartleby," "The Encantadas," "Benito Cereno," and "The Piazza"-also illuminate, in varying guises, the way fictions are created and shared with a wider society. "Billy Budd, Sailor," a classic confrontation between good and evil, is the story of an innocent young man unable to defend himself against a wrongful accusation. His sense of isolation lies at the heart of these later works. Stung by the critical reception and lack of commercial success of his previous two works, Moby-Dick and Pierre, Herman Melville became obsessed with the difficulties of communicating his vision to readers. Tales of compelling power by one of America's greatest writers
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