Benito Cereno

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was the author of such classics as Billy Budd and Moby Dick.

Wyn Kelley is a senior lecturer on the Literature Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Meville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) and of essays in collections such as Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts (1991); Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays (1997); The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (1998); Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick (2006); Melville and Women (2006); and Hawthorne and Melville: Writing Relationship (2007). She has edited Blackwell Publisher’s A Companion to Herman Melville (2006) and coedited, with Jill Barnum and Christopher Sten, "Whole Oceans Away": Melville and the Pacific (2006). She serves as associate editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan and as a founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project.