The Short Fiction of Herman Melville

After the commercial failure of Moby-Dick and Pierre, Melville turned to shorter forms and produced some of the finest short fiction in American literature. This collection gathers the tales he wrote for the magazines of the 1850s, among them Bartleby, the Scrivener, the story of a Wall Street clerk who answers every request with “I would prefer not to”; Benito Cereno, a tense account of a slave revolt aboard a becalmed ship; and The Encantadas, his haunting sketches of the Galapagos. Quiet on the surface, these stories carry a deep unease about work, freedom, and the limits of human sympathy. They repay slow, careful reading. Offered here as free PDF and EPUB editions.