Editing Omoo (section)

==Background==
The basis for the book are the author's experiences in the South Seas. According to scholars Harrison Hayford and Walter Blair, in August and September 1842, the ''Lucy Ann'', an Australian whaleship, took Melville from the Marquesas Islands to Tahiti. There the crew revolted. After being imprisoned in the native jail, he strolled around the islands for some days, before embarking on another whaler for a voyage of six months.<ref>Hayford and Blair (1969), p. xviii</ref>

In the Preface to ''Omoo'', Melville claimed the book was autobiographical, written  "from simple recollection" of some of his experiences in the Pacific in the 1840s and strengthened by his retelling the story many times before family and friends. But scholar Charles Roberts Anderson, working in the late 1930s, discovered that Melville had not simply relied on his memory and went on to reveal a wealth of other sources he drew on in writing the book.<ref>{{cite book|last=Anderson|first=Charles Roberts|title=Melville in the South Seas|url=https://archive.org/details/melvilleinsouths0000ande|url-access=registration|year=1939}}</ref>

Later, Melville scholar [[Harrison Hayford]] made a detailed study of these sources and, in the introduction to a 1969 edition of ''Omoo'', summed up the author's practice, showing that this was a repetition of a process previously used in ''Typee'': <blockquote>"He had altered facts and dates, elaborated events, assimilated foreign materials, invented episodes, and dramatized the printed experiences of others as his own. He had not plagiarized, merely, for he had always rewritten and nearly always improved the passages he appropriated.....first writing out the narrative based on his recollections and invention, then using source books to pad out the chapters he had already written and to supply the stuff of new chapters that he inserted at various points in the manuscript."<ref>Parker p. 455</ref></blockquote>

To a greater extent than he did in ''Typee'', Melville used several source books from which he took passages and rewrote them for his book. The most important of these source books are [[William Ellis (British missionary)|William Ellis]], ''Polynesian Researches'' from 1833, [[Georg von Langsdorff|George H. von Langsdorff]], ''Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World'' from 1813, Charles S. Stewart, ''A Visit to the South Seas in the U.S. ship Vincennes'' from 1831, and [[Charles Wilkes]], ''Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition'' of 1845.<ref>Tanselle (1982), 1327 and 1329-30</ref>