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. Typee and Omoo, 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 of Moby-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-Dick and Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, and Billy Budd complete this edition of Melville's prose. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."Three compelling romances of the South Seas by Herman Melville-Typee-Omoo-Mardi

"These three early novels are stirring romances of the South Seas; many of these fictional details resemble some of the events in Melville's own life in the early 1840s"--Jacket.

"Following the commercial and critical success of his first book, Typee, Herman Melville continued his series of South Seas adventure-romances with Omoo. Melville's second book chronicles the narrator's involvement in a mutiny aboard a South Seas whaling vessel, his incarceration in a Tahitian jail, and then his wanderings as an omoo, or rover, on the island of Eimeo (Moorea). Based on Melville's personal experience as a sailor on a South Pacific whaleship, Omoo is a first-person account of life as a sailor during the nineteenth century, filled with colorful characters and detailed descriptions of the far-flung locales of Polynesia."--BOOK JACKET.

Describes the adventures of a sailor who jumps ship at a south sea island inhabited by cannibals, a voyage around Polynesia, and a quest for an elusive beauty among the islands of a tropical archipelago

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet, best known for Moby-Dick. His first three books were very successful -- Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life; Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas; and Mardi: And a Voyage Thither.