With its intense mix of mystery, adventure, and a surprise ending, Benito Cereno at first seems merely a provocative example from the genre Herman Melville created with his early best-selling novels of the sea. However, most Melville scholars consider it his most sophisticated work, and many, such as novelist Ralph Ellison, have hailed it as the most piercing look at slavery in all of American literature.

Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville. It was first serialized in Putnam's Monthly in 1855 and later included a slightly revised version in his collection The Piazza Tales (1856). In developing the novella, Melville drew almost exclusively on the memoir of the real Captain Amasa Delano, whom Melville depicts as the main protagonist and focal character. Delano recounts how in 1805, his vessel Perseverance encountered the Spanish Tryal (not to be confused with the 17th-century British Tryall), a ship whose slaves had overthrown the Spanish sailors. The narrative of events in the novel closely follows the actual event.

Herman Melville(August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, writer of short stories, and poet from the American Renaissance period. The bulk of his writings was published between 1846 and 1857. Best known for his sea adventure Typee (1846) and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), he was almost forgotten during the last thirty years of his life.