Melville Novels

Research papers on Herman Melville's novels cover a wide variety of topics for this American Literature author. Herman Melville's most famous novels are as follows:

• Moby Dick
• Typee
• Omoo
• Mardi

Today, Herman Melville (1819-1891) is celebrated as one of America's greatest writers. At the age of twenty, Melville went to sea, but jumped ship in the Marqeusas Islands, where he lived among native tribes for several months. A fictionalized account of this adventure, Typee, became Melville's first novel, published in 1846. Typee was an instant best seller and earned for Melville the title of "the man who lived among the cannibals."

Melville's second novel, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, appeared in 1847 and is a sequel to Typee. Both of these novels are autobiographical fiction, in which Melville used events from his experience in order to create a thrilling story. Mardi, his third novel, is entirely fictional, yet was a critical and commercial failure for Melville, and marked the beginning of the decline of his literary career. It was with Mardi that Melville began incorporating philosophical issues into his fiction, a trend that would reach its height with Moby-Dick (1851).

Melville's Short Stories

Neither Redburn (1849) nor White-Jacket (1850) were successful novels, and Moby-Dick was largely ignored upon publication. With Pierre (1852) also being ignored by the public, Melville abandoned writing novels, turning towards short stories and poetry. A short novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years in Exile was serialized in Putnam's Monthly Magazine between 1854 and 1855. His last novel, The Confidence-Man, appeared in 1857.