A fictionalized account about the revolt on a 19th-century Spanish slavery ship, Benito Cereno was first published in three installments in 1855. Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts, Jr. called the story “an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South.” The famous question of what had cast such a shadow upon Cereno was used by American author Ralph Ellison as an epitaph to his 1952 novel Invisible Man, excluding Cereno's answer, The negro. Over time, Melville's story has been increasingly recognized as among his greatest achievements.
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