Redburn: His First Voyage 

by Herman Melville

Anchor Doubleday, A188, 1957 Edition

Based on Herman Melville's first voyage to England as a sailor, REDBURN holds vital clues to Melville as man and artist.

The realities of that voyage are transmuted into fiction in this early novel; and the fiction takes on remarkable symbolic import and intensity.

The journey itself and the return are presented with great vividness of realistic detail, yet with reverberations that make it clear that an introduction to life is the main theme of the book.

The very intensity of the realism, in fact, releases large significances.  Above all, the central scenes in Liverpool and London present the crucial encounter of a young man with an old world. Using his father's annotated guidebook to Liverpool (and thus measuring both himself and the past), young Redburn-Melville makes his way through the labyrinthine squalor and depravity of the city.

Though the details of this visit are Dickensian, the city comes to represent all cities. In the strange journey to "Aladdin's Palace" in London, we enter directly into a nightmare world of encounters and revelations - here we have an essential confrontation of evil in its many forms and shifting ambiguities.

As Newton Arvin says in his study of Melville: "The outward subject of the book is a young boy's first voyage as a sailor before the mast; its inward subject is the initiation of innocence to evil..."

So, early in his career, Melville approached the great themes of Moby-Dick and some of the manner of its art.

Pages unmarked except ownership inscription inside of front cover and notation in pencil at bottom of first page. Very mild wear of cover at edges and corners. Some creasing to spine.