The Piazza Tales

The Piazza Tales is a collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June. Except for the newly written title story, "The Piazza," all of the stories had appeared in Putnam's Monthly in 1853-1855. The collection includes what has long been regarded as the author's three most important achievements in the genre of short fiction, "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", and "The Encantadas", his sketches of the Galápagos Islands. Melville had originally intended to entitle the volume Benito Cereno and Other Sketches, but settled on the definitive title after he had written the introductory story. The book received largely favorable reviews, with reviewers especially praising "The Encantadas".but did not sell well enough to get Melville out of his financial straits, probably because short fiction for magazines had little appeal to bookbuyers. After Melville was rediscovered until the end of the twentieth century, the short works attracting the most critical attention were "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno" and "The Encantadas," with "The Piazza" a little behind those. After reviewers denigrated Moby-Dick in 1851, Harper brothers changed the terms for its successor, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. Melville's London publisher Richard Bentley would not publish Pierre without alterations after he saw the American proofs in 1852, which Melville could not accept. Pierre found no British publisher and hence Melville received no advance payment in the summer of 1852. The reviews for Pierre were harsh, and this damaged Melville's reputation the more because the reviews followed upon the mixed reception of the whaling novel. In the spring of 1853 Melville could not get his next work printed, most likely, Sealts thinks, because Harper "simply refused to bring out another work by Herman Melville in the following year to risk the renewed wrath of already hostile reviewers". Under the circumstances, publishing anonymously seemed an attractive strategy, and the firm did ask him to write for Harper's New Monthly Magazine. His contributions to that periodical were not collected in a book during his lifetime.