Author Description

Typee is the first "romance" of the South Seas, a semi-autobiographical account of life in the Marquesas Islands in the 1840s. A blend of personal experience and the narratives of explorers and missionaries, it influenced many later writers on the Pacific, including Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. This edition offers an Introduction that considers the book from a post-colonial perspective, and detailed annotation of Melville's allusions.