<p>Pierre Glendinning is the nineteen-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford who claims to be his half-sister the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his father’s name spare his mother’s grief and give Isabel her proper share of the estate.</p><p>First published in 1852 <i>Pierre</i> was condemned by critics of the time: “a dead failure” “this crazy rigmarole” and “a literary mare’s nest.” Latter-day critics however have recognized in the story of Melville’s idealistic young hero a corrosive satire of the sentimental gothic novel and a revolutionary foray into modernist literary techniques.</p>