Benito Cereno
by Herman Melville · first published 1926
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IN THE year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor, with a valuable cargo, in the harbour of St. Maria- a small, desert, uninhabited island towards the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. There he had touched for water...Please Note: This book is easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two f
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If you're looking to read Melville without tackling the lengthy Moby-Dick, I highly recommend the short story Benito Cereno: http://www.esp.org/books/melville/piazza/contents/cereno.htm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Cereno
on “What Happened to the Book Herman Melville Wrote After ‘Moby-Dick’?” ↗…had every reason to call it a failure. Melville was pushing himself. In jazz I've heard this called "going out." It's something you earn. His lesser-known works like "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno" are much more coherent and approachable (they stick to a familiar category), but still have much of that slow, mysterious otherworldly quality and are well worth reading (in my humble opinion). https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Benito_Cereno
on “The Original 1851 Reviews of Moby Dick” ↗No. It was followed by the highly experimental flop Pierre. Maybe the closest he came later to getting back to his marketable sea-adventure formula was Benito Cereno. Aside: There's a grossly unjust moral presumption in Cereno, one that can perhaps most charitably be accounted for by a desperation for book sales on Melville's part, and his assumption of benighted…
on “Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick” ↗I read this in 1995 in a freezing cold bedroom lying atop a pale pink candlewick bedspread with the dismal damp Irish night wind howling outside. Pages from Benito Cereno were falling periodically out from the thirty year old penguin paperback. I was on a very mild acid trip (first and last). It was wonderful. Reading it on a screen with these dull minded annotations?…
on “Bartleby, the Scrivener: An interactive, annotated story of Wall Street” ↗