ABSTRACT
This novella, which appeared for the first time in 1855, and was included the year after in The Piazza Tales, is one of the last creative flashes attempted by the imagination of Herman Melville. After 1857 Melville will enter his long silence which, hardly ruffled by a tired poetical effort that the author would be the last to believe in, will persist until death, which occurred at the age of seventy-two in 1891. Concerning "Benito Cereno" it is enough to observe how the ocean in its unmoving tranquillity is a mirror—an infinite mirror—of the growing suspicions of Captain Delano. But whatever be the judgment pronounced upon the works of this feverish twilight, "Benito Cereno" belongs, by a now common consensus, to Melville's best vein. In the first place, it is a story of the sea, and the sea never betrays Melville's imagination.
