Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852) is a novel by American writer Herman Melville. Published the year after Moby-Dick—a critical and commercial failure—Pierre: or, The Ambiguities is a psychological novel in the tradition of Gothic fiction. Melville struggled to find a publisher who would pay him in advance for the book, and its appearance prompted widespread ridicule and condemnation in the press, with some critics claiming that Melville himself had gone mad. The novel plunged Melville deeper into financial ruin, and all but ensured that his next novels, Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man, would be his last.

Pierre Glendinning Jr. is a nineteen-year-old heir who lives with his widowed mother at their family manor in upstate New York. Engaged to the beautiful and respectable Lucy Tartan, Pierre stands to inherit—with his mother’s approval—a life of comfort and wealth. When he meets a young woman named Isabel Banford, his father’s illegitimate daughter, Pierre devises a plan he believes will solve everyone’s problems: he will marry Isabel, who will inherit her share of their father’s wealth, thereby preserving his father’s honor and sparing his mother the embarrassment of her husband’s infidelity. Pierre marries Isabel in secret, and when he tells his mother is thrown out of the house and cut off from his family for good. He moves with Isabel to New York City, where he hopes to make a life for himself as a writer, but the sins of the past refuse to let him rest as he wrestles with his choices and discovers the true nature of his seemingly good intentions.

This edition of Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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