MELVILLE, Herman.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Mardi: and a Voyage Thither. First American edition of Melville's third book, his first major full-length fiction, an allegorical romance set in the South Seas based on his own experiences there. At this time, Melville "had never written about anything except his own experiences, if one takes Mardi as his current intellectual autobiography; and his interior development, after all, was his wildest adventure, not killing whales in the Pacific" (Parker, p. 9).Appearing shortly before Moby-Dick (1851), Mardi was "to become one of the most interesting of all documents in the life of a man who changed, in the course of three short years, from a popular writer exploiting the novelty of his own experiences into one of the most stimulating inhabitants of the complex world of the 19th-century mind" (Howard, p. 111).It was initially published in London earlier the same year in a run of 1,000 copies. Publication in America took place shortly afterwards, in two volumes.

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.