Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
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Pierre Glendinning is the nineteen-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel, Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his fatherโs name, spare his motherโs grief, and give Isabel her proper share of the estate.
First published in 1852, Pierre was condemned by critics of the time: โa dead failure,โ โthis crazy rigmarole,โ and โa literary mareโs nest.โ Latter-day critics, however, have recognized in the story of Melvilleโs idealistic young hero a corrosive satire of the sentimental gothic novel and a revolutionary foray into modernist literary techniques.
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Herman Melville (1819โ1891) was born in New York. Family hardships forced him to leave school for various occupations, including shipping as a cabin boy to Liverpool in 1839โa voyage that sparked his love for the sea. A shrewd social critic and philosopher in his fiction, he is considered an outstanding writer of the sea and a great stylist who mastered both realistic narrative and a rich, rhythmical prose.
Robin Field is the AudioFile Earphones Awardโwinning narrator of numerous audiobooks, as well as an award-winning actor, singer, writer, and lyricist whose career has spanned six decades. He has starred on and off Broadway, headlined at Carnegie Hall, authored numerous musical reviews, and hosted or performed on a number of television and radio programs over the years.
