Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, "Pierre, or The Ambiguities" has since struck critics as modern in its psychological probings and literary technique--fit, as Carl Van Vechten said in 1922, to be ranked with "The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, " and "Ulysses." None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.
This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as the surviving evidence permits. Based on collations of the two issues and the two impressions of the single edition publishing in Melville's lifetime, it incorporates necessary emendations made by the series editors. This text of "Pierre" is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
- ISBN10 0875320031
- ISBN13 9780875320038
- Publish Date 1 October 1962
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 13 March 2021
- Imprint Hendricks House Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 608
- Language English