Though most people automatically associate Herman Melville with his novel Moby Dick, Melville wrote many other important works of literature. Several of these concern the South Seas, an area that Melville had first hand experience with.
This article on a Melville novel, Typee, reflects on Melville's concern with understanding the differences between civilization and more primitive modes of existence, especially the way some civilized people develop a desire to return to a putatively better state of innocence by abandoning civilization for "nature." The article is an excellent exploration of an important work of American literature and how that work can serve us today in thinking about what is worth revivifying in the Western tradition.
Good literature speaks to us today, sometimes in surprisingly relevant ways.