Best known for producing one of the masterworks of American literature, the novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also branched out into many other genres of writing over the course of his career. The novella Israel Potter: His Fifty Years in Exile was initially published in serial form in a magazine. It offers a fictionalized account of an American-born man whose remarkable life included time spent as a soldier, sailor, prisoner, spy, laborer, and street peddler.