![]() ![]() The story centers around a narrator, his aged-for-ambitions uncle, and his uncle’s black underling Yorpy, all of whom undergo taking the Hudson upstream to a secret location to test out the uncle’s long-awaited, long-suffering invention. ![]() Its subtitle (Melville loves his subtitles!) is “A Story of the Hudson River,” which has a lot to say about the story come the ending. “The Happy Failure” is the 12-page gem I wish I had started with, before Ahab, before Bartleby, before Kish. People really do like Melville, and he’s gained the critical respect of the academy for his complex and vast allusive knowledge, as well as his unprecedented voyages into the realms of the post-modern (check out The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade for a sampling!)–and for these reasons and more, he’s also become something of a pop-culture doll these days. The only short story most people are required to read in the Melville anthology is “Bartleby, the Scrivener”–a completely depressing novella about a man gone gloomy in Wall Street. ![]()
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