This book became the model for American writing in the South Seas genre. It would influence everything and everyone that followed in its wake, London, O'Brien, Nordhoff and Hall, Frisbie, and even Michener. First published in 1846, it is an account, fictionalized and certainly embellished upon, of Melville's experiences in the valley of Typee, in the Marquesas.

Labeled by some a "travel book," Typee is actually a romantic adventure novel. And it is perhaps the most enthralling thing Melville ever wrote. Not of the stature of Moby Dick, it nevertheless became Melville's most enduringly popular book. In it, he describes the adventures he had (or may have almost had) among the cannibal Typee on Nukuheva. But it is a world where cannibalism is put into a certain perspective as a religious ritual limited to the priestly elite and chieftains. The rest of life among the Typee Melville describes in almost paradisical terms. Savages the Typee are, says Melville, but they are noble savages, living in better harmony with nature, work, and their fellow beings than the enslaved workers and enfeebled elites of civilized countries.

Compared to other works of the era, there is an immediacy to Typee that is gripping. It almost seems modern in its impact on the reader. The stilted language and carefully polite words and images of such writers as Hawthorne gives way to a language that is descriptive, active, and undiluted by the "civilization" it criticizes. At book's end, all that is left to wonder is why Melville never returned. The beautiful and beguiling Fayaway may have been a literary invention, but her like and what she symbolized in Melville's imagination must have remained with him the rest of his lengthy life. ( )