The Piazza Tales

Six pieces from the years when America had stopped reading him: a Wall Street clerk who prefers not to, a slave ship whose captain is not the master, an island of enchanted tortoises, a lightning-rod salesman. Melville shipped out on a whaler at twenty-one; by the time he wrote these he was writing for almost no one, and Bartleby has outlived everything published beside it. Sixty plates of American painting, from Benjamin West to Winslow Homer, carry the moods of the book: weatherbeaten faces, seaside horns, and breakers on a sandy shore.