Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (English Library) - Softcover

Woodcock, George; Melville, Herman

3.56

5,515 ratings by Goodreads

9780140430707: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (English Library)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140430709 ISBN 13: 9780140430707

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1977

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TYPEE was Herman Melville's first book. It is an idyll of four months among primitive South Sea islanders. It won him great fame during his life.\n\nMelville always mixes his own extraordinary personal experiences with later research to produce powerful and imaginative works.\n\nTYPEE shocked its original audience with a truthful account of Polynesian tribal life. It also defined the author: caught in its glare like a fly in amber, he stands frozen before the exotic, sharply focused on it, yet forced to remain forever alien.\n\n"A vivid picture of a civilized man in contact with the exotic dream-like life of the tropics." (Readers Encyclopedia)

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Review:

"Attractive editions, clear type, good introductions and annotations."--Barbara Packer, UCLA
"An excellend edition. Blair's deeply informed introduction and notes lend contextual substance necessary to an historically aware appreciation of Typee."--Lawrence Howe, Roosevelt University
"Ideal teaching edition because of the splendid notes, bibliographies and chronologies."--Robert Regan, University of Pennsylvania
"Attractive editions, clear type, good introductions and annotations."--Barbara Packer, UCLA
"An excellend edition. Blair's deeply informed introduction and notes lend contextual substance necessary to an historically aware appreciation of Typee."--Lawrence Howe, Roosevelt University
"Ideal teaching edition because of the splendid notes, bibliographies and chronologies."--Robert Regan, University of Pennsylvania
"Attractive editions, clear type, good introductions and annotations."--Barbara Packer, UCLA
"An excellend edition. Blair's deeply informed introduction and notes lend contextual substance necessary to an historically aware appreciation of Typee."--Lawrence Howe, Roosevelt University
"Ideal teaching edition because of the splendid notes, bibliographies and chronologies."--Robert Regan, University of Pennsylvania

About the Author:

Herman Melville (1819-91) became in his late twenties a highly successful author of exotic novels based on his experiences as a sailor - writing in quick succession Typee, Omoo, Redburn and White-Jacket. However, his masterpiece Moby-Dick was met with incomprehension and the other later works which are now the basis of his reputation, such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Confidence-Man, were failures. Melville stopped writing fiction and the rest of his long life was spent first as a lecturer and then, for nineteen years, as a customs official in New York City. He was also the author of the immensely long poem Clarel, which was similarly dismissed. At the end of his life he wrote Billy Budd, Sailor which was published posthumously in 1924.

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