With Queen Scheherazade and her fascinating, disarming, and deceptively simple stories within an equally amazing broad framework, the story of Sindbad and his voyages, of Ali Baba and his encounter with thieves, and Aladin's magic lamp, the Arabian Nights is not just a timeless classic and the bible of Oriental romance, but also one of the world's most vivid and absorbing collections of stories, enthralling its readers through the centuries. Along with Asian and European writers, American writers also were influenced by this endless fountain of pleasure and inspiration. This paper makes an attempt to capture the spirit and extent of influence of Arabian Nights on Herman Melville throughout his literary career, deeply coloring and characterizing several of his works, both late and early, and providing him with a sense of the romantic "other."

Like the ancient Aesop's Fables, Sanskrit Panchatantra, Buddhist Jataka Tales, Persian Hazar Afsaneh ("A Thousand Tales"), Italian (Boccaccio's) Decameron, and Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the anonymous Arabian Nights, also called A / One / The Thousand and One Nights, whose stories grew and developed over hundreds of years since the time of the Baghdad-based Abbasid Caliph Harun Al-Rashid in the ninth century, is one of the most influential masterpieces of literature the world has ever known. The Arabian Nights' Entertainments is the title of the first but anonymous English edition (1706), also called the "Grub Street" version translated from the first European version in French by Antoine Galland in 1704-12. Its popularity made many other scholars render it into many other European languages from different sources, and into English alone by Ambrose Philips (1714), Jonathan Scott (1811), Edward William Lane (1838-40), John Payne (1882-84), Sir Richard Francis Burton (1885-1888), Andrew Lang (1898), and Husain Haddawy (1990s), to mention only the major print editions, let alone different other versions in audio-visual media. Had there been no Arabian Nights, we would have never known a treasury of great stories or the eternally memorable characters of Scheherazde, Sindbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba, and others. "These characters," as one writer says, "are the most illustrious of the concourse of humanity swarming the streets of Baghdad and Cairo and Bukhara, not as these cities ever were, but as they eternally are in the wonderful realm of Scheherazade's imagination. It is a realm of gorgeous palaces, of opulent underground hideaways, of wooden horses that fly, of benevolent dogs that present beggars with objects of gold. It is a realm where sorcery conjures up wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, where inscrutable providence turns a stranger into a sultan in the twinkling of an eye."

The storytelling art of the Arabian Nights, as demonstrated by the charming variety of its stories and stories-within-stories, especially their immortal first-person narrator-heroine Scheherazade with her simple but timelessly appealing and disarming four-word introduction, "Once upon a time," has attracted the popular readership of all ages over the centuries. Its contents are drawn from far and near like pre-Islamic Arabia, Egypt, Spain, India, and Central Asia (Uzbekistan) and extend from pre-historic times to the sixteenth century. Folk in nature, as most of the stories are, they took shape by the word of mouth through generations and vary from delightful to realistic to comic and clownish, from action to fantasy, adventure tale to animal fable. The courtly and aristocratic tradition also is represented in some stories.

American Literature Journal, Scheherazade, The Arabian Nights, American Writers, European Languages, Aristocratic Tradition, Western Mountain Castles, American Literature, European Writers, Emblematic World, Islamic Scripture.