Great Short Works of Herman Melville Author:Herman Melville Melville's humor is inseparable from the imaginative intelligence supporting his gravest untertakings in fiction. The impressions of life and destiny it delivers are not materially different from what emerges in theose works of his...where comic extravagance is subordinated almost completely to...the wit of moral and psychological understanding... more »... It is on this ground among the intense images of spiritual passion and change given to us in Melville's most purely original tales that we feel his greatness as a writer - from the Intro by Warner Berthoff« less