Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland; Herman Melville was born into prosperity in New York. Despite their divergent backgrounds, these contemporary American authors shared amazingly similar ideas about the most pressing issues of their day, including war, slavery, abolition, and race relations. They also lived and worked near each other during the peak of their careers. Did they meet? Author Robert K. Wallace raises that provacative question, seeking clues as he follows their parallel footsteps through New Bedford, New York City and Albany in this most unusal and fasicnating book! File it under "biography," or "American History" or "American literature" or "abolition" or just plain "good reading!"

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and Herman Melville (1819-1891) addressed in their writings a range of issues that continue to resonate in American culture: the reach and limits of democracy; the nature of freedom; the roles of race, gender, and sexuality; and the place of the United States in the world. Yet they are rarely discussed together, perhaps because of their differences in race and social position. Douglass escaped from slavery and tied his well-received nonfiction writing to political activism, becoming a figure of international prominence. Melville was the grandson of Revolutionary War heroes and addressed urgent issues through fiction and poetry, laboring in increasing obscurity. In eighteen original essays, the contributors to this collection explore the convergences and divergences of these two extraordinary literary lives. Developing new perspectives on literature, biography, race, gender, and politics, this volume ultimately raises questions that help rewrite the color line in nineteenth-century studies. Contributors: Elizabeth Barnes, College of William and Mary Hester Blum, The Pennsylvania State University Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin-Madison John Ernest, West Virginia University William Gleason, Princeton University Gregory Jay, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Carolyn L. Karcher, Washington, D.C. Rodrigo Lazo, University of California, Irvine Maurice S. Lee, Boston University Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland, College Park Steven Mailloux, University of California, Irvine Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley John Stauffer, Harvard University Sterling Stuckey, University of California, Riverside Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles Elisa Tamarkin, University of California, Irvine Susan M. Ryan, University of Louisville David Van Leer, University of California, Davis Maurice Wallace, Duke University Robert K. Wallace, Northern Kentucky University Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago

Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation

Fredrick Douglass (1818-1895), a fugitive slave who became the best-known black abolitionist orator and autobiographer, and Herman Melville (1819-1891), a fiction writer recognized for the elusiveness of his meanings, both composed stories about slave revolts at sea. In the decade just before the Civil War, during years of increasingly angry debate about slavery, Douglass in "The Heroic Slave" (1853) and Melville in "Benito Cereno" (1855) fictionalized important slave insurrections. Of the mutiny on the Creole, on which Douglass's story is based, the editors recount what can be recovered about the slave Madison Washington, who led the revolt, and reconstruct the events before and after the uprising. The editors warn the readers that the official documents about the case are all biased against the mutineers, who were never allowed to tell their story to American officials. Addressing largely white readers in the North, Douglass, to the contrary, speaks clearly as an abolitionist: Slaves wanted their freedom and were justified in using violence to gain it. "Benito Cereno" is based on Captain Amasa Delano's chapter in his Narrative of Voyages and Travels... (1817) about a slave mutiny off the coast of South America. Writing in part for a northern readership, Melville tells of a mutiny that, unlike Madison Washington's, was suppressed. Delano's account shows no sympathy for the slaves. Melville's view is hidden in ambiguities. "Benito Cereno" is one of Melville's stories most often collected in anthologies; Douglas's "The Heroic Slave" is rarely reprinted.

The differences between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany have historically been reduced to a simple binary pronouncement: assimilationist versus separatist. Now Robert S. Levine restores the relationship of these two important nineteenth-century African American writers to its original complexity. He explores their debates over issues like abolitionism, emigration, and nationalism, illuminating each man's influence on the other's political vision. He also examines Delany and Douglass's debates in relation to their own writings and to the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Though each saw himself as the single best representative of his race, Douglass has been accorded that role by history--while Delany, according to Levine, has suffered a fate typical of the black separatist: marginalization. In restoring Delany to his place in literary and cultural history, Levine makes possible a fuller understanding of the politics of antebellum African American leadership.

Frederick Douglass’s changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in his many conflicting accounts of events during his journey from slavery to freedom. Robert S. Levine creates a fascinating collage of this elusive subject—revisionist biography at its best, offering new perspectives on Douglass the social reformer, orator, and writer.

Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby, the Scrivener are two of the most revered shorter works of fiction in history. Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a beautifully redesigned collection that represents the best short work of an American master.As Warner Berthoff writes in his introduction to this volume, "It is hard to think of a major novelist or storyteller who is not also a first-rate entertainer . . . a master, according to choice, of high comedy, of one or another robust species of expressive humour, or of some special variety of the preposterous, the grotesque, the absurd. And Melville, certainly, is no exception. A kind of vigorous supervisory humour is his natural idiom as a writer, and one particular attraction of his shorter work is the fresh further display it offers of this prime element in his literary character."

From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. Having earlier seized control of the vessel and slaughtered most of the crew, they were staging an elaborate ruse, acting as if they were humble servants. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception, he responded with explosive violence. Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity explores the multiple forces that culminated in this extraordinary event—an event that already inspired Herman Melville's masterpiece Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin, with the gripping storytelling that was praised in Fordlandia, uses the dramatic happenings of that day to map a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas, capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.

Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate "reader friendly" type sizes have been chosen for each title--offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords. This edition of Billy Budd includes a Foreword, Biographical Note, and Afterword by James Gunn. Aboard the warship Bellipotent, the young orphan Billy Budd was called the handsome sailor. Billy was tall, athletic, noble looking; he was friendly, innocent, helpful and ever-cheerful. He was a fierce fighter and a loyal friend. All the men and officers liked him... All but one: Master-at-Arms Claggart. Envious, petty Claggart plotted to make Billy's life miserable. But when a fear of mutinies swept through the fleet, Claggart realized he could do more than just torment the Handsome Sailor...He could frame Billy Budd for treason... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.