Redburn: His First Voyage

"Redburn [is] one of [Melville's] most appealing and certainly the most personal of his works. ... Redburn, the grief-stricken youth, cast among the vicious, ruined men on the ship, walking the streets of Liverpool in the late 1830s, even meeting with the homosexual hustler Harry Bolton... Nothing in Melville is more beautifully expressed than the mood of early sorrow in the forlorn passage at the opening of Redburn." -- Elizabeth Hardwick, "Melville in Love," The New York Review of Books