title: Tales, Poems, and Other Writings (Modern Library)
author:  Herman Melville 
description: Melville remains an enigma, as Elizabeth Hardwick observed in her recent interpretative portrait, and most of his shorter works and poetry have gone unread by all but the most scholarly of readers. Bryant, a Melville expert with a clear and vigorous prose style, offers a fresh view of Melville as a failed commercial author who became a great artist concerned with such mysteries as faith and transcendence, sexuality and man's relationship with nature, and the differences and commonalities of various ethnic and racial groups. Melville was also profoundly involved with language itself, an obsession evident in his painstaking revisions, a sampling of which are presented here to chart the evolution of his work, and his boldly experimental approach to combining prose and poetry. Bryant's well-chosen selections, including letters, never-before-published stories and poems, and sections from the long verse epic <i>Clarel</i>, based on Melville's travels in the Holy Land, support his assertion that Melville and his grand, complex, and soulful work need to be seen in a new light. <i>Donna Seaman</i><br /><i>Copyright  American Library Association. All rights reserved</i>
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  Contents
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  About the author
  Herman Melville was born in New
  York City on August 1, 1819, and re-
  ceived his early education in that city. He
  says he gained his first love of adventure
  listening to his father Allan, who was an
  extensive traveller for his time, telling
  tales of the monstrous waves at sea, moun-
  tain high, of the masts bending like twigs,
  and all about Le Havre and Liverpool.
  After the death of his father the family (eight brothers and sisters)
  moved to the village of Lansingburg, on the Hudson River. There
  Herman remained until 1835, when he attended the Albany Classical
  School for some months.
  Herman’s roving disposition, and a desire to support himself inde-
  pendently of family assist