Pierre Glendinning is prepared to inherit his father's estate when he meets a woman claiming to be his half-sister. Attracted to the mysterious lady and determined to share his inheritance, the passionate young idealist incites a family psychodrama—a maelstrom of recriminations leading to banishment and impoverishment and concluding in madness and murder.
Herman Melville's 1852 satire of the Gothic tradition, with its themes of incest and moral relativism, shocked his contemporaries. A critical and financial disaster, the novel further dimmed the author's already fading reputation and languished for decades in obscurity. With the twentieth-century reassessment of Melville's work, Pierre is now regarded as a revolutionary advance in literary technique. Modern readers delight in the intricate, digressive prose for which the author is justly famed as well as the book's compelling exploration of the psychological and sexual tensions within a family circle.