Showing results for "Pierre or The Ambiguities" in Classics

Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, "Pierre" 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.

Pierre Glendinning is the 19-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel, Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his father's name, spare his mother's grief, and give Isabel her share of the estate.