The tradition of the Pacific Tale developed in the late-nineteenth century after a period of intense contact between Euro-Americans and Pacific Islanders. Particular ways of viewing the Pacific had developed following sensationalised explorers’ accounts, and these only solidified following publication of Herman Meville’s Omoo and Typee in the mid-nineteenth century. Melville’s work helped to cement three tropes that had been in play since contact and were to remain powerful in representations of Pacific Islanders for another century: the Noble Savage, the cannibal savage, and the dusky Polynesian belle. Other writers, such as Charles Warren Stoddard and Pierre Loti, contributed to this view of the Pacific. From 1890 to 1950, five writers from outside the region travelled to, and set short fiction in it: Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke, Jack London, W. Somerset Maugham, and James A. Michener. All were aware of the writers who had gone before, especially Melville, and they self-consciously, at least from Becke onwards, created the tradition of the Pacific Tale. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century, especially from 1970 onwards, that Pacific Islander writers, exemplified by Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau’ofa, transcend and go beyond the Pacific Tale.