This collection gathers together original essays dealing with Melvilles relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic otherness, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography by Robert Milder, an introduction by Giles Gunn, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melvilles connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melvilles commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American writing.