Best known as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville is one of America's greatest writers. His achievements range from popular novels and experimental fiction to powerful poetry. His works are tragic and funny, impassioned and ironic, obsessed with philosophical seeking and attuned to the details of everyday life. Melville engaged the pressing issues of his day, from economic inequality and the American slavery crisis to the rise of science and the fragility of democracy. He dwelled on timeless questions about loneliness and intimacy, moral and political responsibility, the limits of our knowledge and agency, and the place of human beings within nature and the cosmos.

Melville's life was dramatic, and his career improbable. He was born into privilege, fell into poverty as an adolescent, hunted whales and lived with the Tai Pi people of Polynesia, served in the United States Navy, skyrocketed to fame as a novelist, ruined his career by challenging religious, political, sexual, and artistic conventions, reinvented himself as a poet, and died in relative obscurity just as readers began to appreciate his genius. The scope and diversity of Melville's literature reflects an artist of restless ambition. Herman Melville: A Very Short Introduction helps readers explore the richness of his work.