At the time of his death he was on the verge of completing the manuscript for his first novel in three decades, Billy Budd, and had accumulated several large folders of unpublished verse.

The year 1853 saw a physical disaster that renders the books published by him in America prior to that date even more scarce today than would normally have been the case.

At one o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, December 10, 1853, the establishment of Melville's publishers Harper Brothers was completely destroyed by fire, reportedly caused by a plumber throwing a lit candle into a bucket of camphene, which he mistook for water.

The fire burned Harper's stock of Melville's unsold books, which consisted of Typee, 185; Omoo, 276; Mardi, 491; Redburn, 296; White Jacket, 292; Moby-Dick, 297; and Pierre, 494.

[4] Produced under the general editorship of Howard P. Vincent, the series was originally projected to include 14 volumes but in the end only 7 appeared.

[5] In the 1960s, Northwestern University Press, in alliance with the Newberry Library and the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, established ongoing publication runs of Melville's various titles.

[6] The aim of the editors, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, was to present unmodernized "critical texts" which represented "as nearly as possible the author's intentions.

The Sequel, containing "The Story of Toby", was written in July, 1846, and incorporated in the Revised Edition published in the same year.

In England, John Murray paid an additional £50 for the Sequel, which was first printed as a small pamphlet in an edition of 1250 copies, and subsequently incorporated in the book.

That same year saw the Princeton University Press issue a collection of the remaining known stories under the title The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches.

"That Melville was a poet only in prose is a truth almost universally acknowledged among his critics, one guaranteed to endure as long as the poems remain unavailable in a complete, reliable edition.

If one includes the poems contained in his novels his entire poetic oeuvre approaches the size of Lord Byron's or Robert Browning's.