Redburn
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Redburn a story by Herman Melville. The author returned to the tone of his first novels,Typee (1846) and Omoo (1849). Redburn is a semi-autobiographical novel concerning the sufferings of a refined youth among brutal sailors. This theme of a youth confronted by realities and evils for which he is unprepared is a prominent one in Melville's works.
While not generally considered as profound as later works by the same author, of these the most notable being Moby Dick, the novel can be viewed as a precursor to later, more complex works of fiction. Many of the themes explored in Moby-Dick can also be found in "Redburn." The character "Jackson," for example, can be viewed in many ways as a forerunner of the famous Captain Ahab.
With "Redburn" Melville was obviously confronting the demands placed upon a newly popular author, and in several respects the novel is a return to the blueprint laid out in his first book, "Typee." The novel does, however, display some of the more experimental tendencies that made Moby-Dick so popular after the author's death, and begins to incorporate much of the symbolism which separates his earlier work from later, denser novels such as "Mardi" and "Pierre."
It contains one of the notable examples of spontaneous combustion in literature, along with Dickens' Bleak House.
