Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819–1891) wrote Moby-Dick, one of the supreme American novels, whose cosmic ambition and symbolic reach place it near the fantastic. His shorter work, the eerie ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, the machine-haunted ‘The Bell-Tower’, and the utopian/dystopian sketches of ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’, shows a mind drawn to the strange and the speculative beneath the surface of realism.