Typee

Typee was Melville's first book, and made him one of the best-known American authors overnight.

Typee is one of the first and arguably the most intelligent contemporary account of Western and Polynesian cultural interaction in the nineteenth century Pacific, and provided many later writers (such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke and Jack London) with the themes and images that came to symbolise the Pacific experience: cannibalism, cultural absorption, colonialism, exoticism, eroticism, natural plenty and beauty, and a perceived simplicity of native lifestyle, desires and motives.