Piazza Tales : Mint Editions : 9781513205854 : 1513205854 : 09 Sep 2021 : The Piazza Tales (1856) is a collection of short stories by American writer Herman Melville. Before publication, five of its six stories appeared in Putnam's Monthly during a period of productivity with which Melville sought to achieve popular success as a writer of literary fiction. After the failure of his novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville struggled to find a publisher who would accept his work, and contemporary reviews of The Piazza Tales were negative to lukewarm at best. When Melville's work was reappraised in the 1920s, scholars recognized these stories as not only well-composed, but keenly focused on the dominant ethical and sociopolitical issues of their day. In ?The Piazza,? a man buys an old farmhouse with a view on the nearby mountains. Despite his fortune, he spends his days longing for more, wishing his home had its own piazza so he could share the beauty of th