MELVILLE, Herman.

£2,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Mardi: and a Voyage Thither. True first edition of Melville's first major full-length fiction, an allegorical romance set in the South Seas. 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 Britain in a run of 1,000 copies. Publication in America took place shortly afterwards, in two volumes. Melville's only other edition published in the triple-decker format was The Whale.

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