Wyn Kelley is a Senior Lecturer in the Literature Faculty at MIT. She is the author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) and editor of A Companion to Herman Melville (Blackwell, 2006) and an edition of Benito Cereno 2006, and has also written a number of essays on Melville. She is Associate Director of the Melville Society journal Leviathan.

“Read alongside Melville's original writings, this book will be an excellent companion for a Melville course. Essential.” (Choice, November 2008)

• Texts and Abbreviations. List of Illustrations.Acknowledgments.Preface.Part I: Introduction.1. Melville’s Life.2. ‘Agatha’ and the Invention of Narrative.Part II: Melville’s Early Yarns.3. ‘Making Literary Use of the Story’: Typee and Omoo.4. ‘A Regular Story Founded on Striking Incidents’: Mardi, Redburn, and White-Jacket.Part III: Writing New Gospel in Moby-Dick and Pierre.5. ‘So Much of Pathos & So Much of Depth’: Moby-Dick.6. ‘All Tender Obligations’: Pierre.Part IV: Turning a New Leaf: Short Fiction, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man.7. ‘A Leaf from Professional Experience’: Short Fiction of the 1850s.8. ‘Peculiarly Latitudinarian Notions’: Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man.Part V: Melville’s Later Career.9. ‘Fulness & Veins & Beauty’: Battle-Pieces and Clarel.10. ‘Different Considerations’: Late Poetry.11. ‘Instinct with Significance’: Billy Budd.Afterword: ‘Restoring To You Your Own Property’: Owning Melville.Appendix: The ‘Agatha’ Correspondence.Notes.Bibliography.Index