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About Typee

The young adventurous sailors, Tommo and Toby, abandon ship and flee into the jungle of an island in French Polynesia. But their feelings of victory will be short-lived. Because they are about to run straight into the hands of the Typee, the most feared of the battling cannibal tribes. Inspired by his own adventures, twenty-five-year-old Herman Melville wrote 'Typee' (1846) as a blend of creative memoir, cultural commentary, and good story-telling. He would later tell his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne (author of 'The Scarlet Letter') that "from my twenty-fifth year I date my life". Despite being mostly recognized, today, as the author of the classic novel, 'Moby Dick', 'Typee' was Melville's best-selling novel in his life-time.