Herman Melville: Typee, Omoo, Mardi

This first volume of The Library of America's three-volume edition of the complete prose works of Herman Melville includes three romances of the South Seas.TypeeandOmoo, based on the young Melville's experiences on a whaling ship, are exuberant accounts of the idyllic life among the "cannibals" in Polynesia.

They remained his most popular works well into the 20th century.Mardi("the world" in Polynesian) is a mixture of love story, adventure, and political allegory, set on a mythical Pacific island, that looks forward to the complexities ofMoby-Dick.

Together, these three romances give early evidence of the genius and daring that make Melville the master novelist of the sea and a precursor of modernist literature.

Two companion volumes--Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-DickandHerman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales,The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, and Billy Buddcomplete this edition of Melville's prose.