Moby Dick is a literary classic. It charts the adventures of a madman as he pits his wits against a creature, huge and dangerous, set against the haunting background of the sea and its legends and myths. This is not a book about whaling, more a book about humanity, belief and perception, written with skill and humor. The book deserves its position as a classic epic tale. Typee was Herman Melvilles first book. He mixes his personal experience of living with the primitive South Sea islanders for four months with further research and his powerful imagination to produce this great work. During his lifetime this book won him great fame, shocking his contemporaries with his descriptions of tribal life. The Readers Encyclopedia described it thus: "A vivid picture of a civilized man in contact with the exotic dream-like life of the tropics." Omoo is the Polynesian word for someone who roams from island to island. The book is once again based on his own experiences, this time he is a crew member whaling in the South Seas. The book gives an account of the life of a sailor in the nineteenth century on the high seas - enlisting the locals, handling deserters and mutiny, visiting beautiful Polynesian islands. A fascinating window through time and space. Redburn is a novel taking us back to Herman Melvilles youth - in this book he is a boy on a packet ship sailing between New York and Liverpool. It is a coming of age story, moving from innocence to manhood, encountering bullying, slavery and social privilege. It is punctuated with humor and irony, metaphor and transendence. A semi-autobiographical novel, it helps us understand Herman Melville who lost his father when his was only twelve, his father died penniless after the failure of his business.