Drawn from Melville's own adolescent experience aboard a merchant ship, Redburn charts the coming-of-age of Wellingborough Redburn, a young innocent who embarks on a crossing to Liverpool together with a roguish crew. Once in Liverpool, Redburn encounters the squalid conditions of the city and meets Harry Bolton, a bereft and damaged soul, who takes him on a tour of London that includes a scene of rococo decadence unlike anything else in Melville's fiction. In her Introduction, Elizabeth Hardwick writes, "Redburn is rich in masterful portraits—a gallery of wild colors, pretensions and falsehoods, fleeting associations of unexpected tenderness. . . . Redburn is not a document; it is a work of art by the unexpected genius of a sailor, Herman Melville.”

This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the first American edition of 1849.

Herman Melville was an American Renaissance novelist, poet, and short story writer who lived from August 1, 1819, to September 28, 1891. His most well-known pieces are Typee (1846), a romanticized narrative of his experiences in Polynesia; Moby-Dick (1851); and Billy Budd, Sailor, a novella that was released after his death. Although Melville was no longer well-known to the general public at the time of his death, a Melville renaissance began in 1919, the year of his birth. In the end, Moby-Dick was regarded as one of the best American novels. The third child of a wealthy merchant who died in 1832, leaving the family in terrible financial shape, Melville was born in New York City. He sailed as a common sailor in 1839, first as a whaler Acushnet and subsequently as a merchant ship. However, he abandoned ship in the Marquesas Islands. His first work, Typee, and its follow-up, Omoo (1847), were travelogues inspired by his interactions with the island peoples. He was able to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of Boston lawyer Lemuel Shaw, because to their prosperity. His debut novel not drawn from personal experience, Mardi (1849), was not well received.