"Following his similar guides to the fiction of Hawthorne and Henry James, Gale once more provides serious readers with a carefully conceived and executed key to an American literary master's art. The details of Melville's fiction are often hard to remember; but these lucid, balanced summaries and lists restore them effectively. For the complex novels, Gale tactfully hints at important reservoirs of symbolism and expertly gives perspective to Melville's infinite 'digressions.' After each plot summary, the characters are listed alphabetically. The second half of the book locates and describes the characters. From the hand of a seasoned scholar, such a manual emphasizes the purely literary qualities of Melville's prose and verse fictions and disdains comparison with the miserable hodgepodges of plot summary and critical distortion we too often see in the ubiquitous crib notes sold at campus book stores. Gale's book is a valuable reference work for either the literary scholar or the ambitious general reader; as such it should be available in all academic and large public library collections." — Library Journal