Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in his lifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” along with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands that make up “The Encantadas,” as well as three more short stories: “The Piazza,” “The Bell-Tower,” and “The Lightning-Rod Man.” This new edition places these stories in the context of nineteenth-century debates over slavery, free will and determinism, science and technology, and the nature and value of literary artistry. The stories in The Piazza Tales demonstrate the global range of Melville’s cultural and aesthetic concerns, as Melville set his stories in locales ranging from rural western Massachusetts and Wall Street in the United States to the Pacific coast of South America and southern Europe.

This edition is especially concerned with Melville’s engagement with both political questions related to slavery and imperialism and aesthetic questions germane to the short-story tradition as developed by his near-contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.