The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s

Abstract

Abstract Melville’s career as a short story writer was a brief but productive one. In the wake of a steady decline in both his reputation and the sales of his novels— from the initial stunning success of Typee in 1846 to the disastrous reception of Pierre, his seventh novel—Melville in the spring of 1853 first tried his hand at short fiction, producing four stories by the summer, including one of his most remarkable, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In a brief span of three years, he would write a total of sixteen stories and would publish all but one, “The Two Temples.” Financially, his foray into short fiction was comparatively successful, since he was paid the unusually high sum of $5 per page (the customary fee was $3) by both Putnam’s Monthly and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the two periodicals in which all but one of his published short stories appeared. Besides earning nearly $1,000 for his fourteen magazine tales, which was substantially more than his royalties for Moby-Dick and Pierre combined, he produced at least four stories that modern Melville critics have come to regard as some of the best fictions in his entire oeuvre, after Moby-Dick: “Bartleby,” “The Encantadas,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and “Benito Cereno.”1 study are also called into question.