Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas

Overview

A humorours fiction based on the concept of a travel memoir revoloving around a sailor and his journey on the vast sea. He encounters various types of life at the time; sea life aboard ship, island life by the native people, customs of the natives. Detailed descriptions of practical jokes, drunken brawls, and cultural faux-pas make readers smile, and sometimes laugh out loud.

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Author Information

Bio of Herman Melville

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. When his father died, he was forced to leave school and find work. After passing through some minor clerical jobs, the eighteen-year-old young man shipped out to sea, first on a short cargo trip, then, at twenty-one, on a three-year South Sea whaling venture. From the experiences accumulated on this voyage would come the material for his early books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), as well as for such masterpieces as Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856) and Billy Budd, Sailor (posthumous, 1924). Though the first two novels--popular romantic adventures--sold well, Melville's more serious writing failed to attract a large audience, perhaps because it attacked the current philosophy of transcendentalism and its espoused "self-reliance." (As he made clear in the savagely comic The Confidence Man, 1857), Melville thought very little of Emersonian philosophy. He spent his later years working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing only poems comprising Battle-Pieces (1866). He died in 1891, leaving Billy Budd, Sailor, unpublished.

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Additional Info

Imprint

ReadHowYouWant

Filesize

1.21 MB

Number of Pages

316

eBook ISBN

9781442938489