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Cover image of Herman Melville
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Herman Melville

A Biography

Hershel Parker

Volume
Volume 1, 1819-1851
Publication Date
Binding Type

From the Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville, the first of a two-volume project constituting the fullest biography of Melville ever published.

Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Literature and Language

Finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize

Having left most of Moby-Dick with a printer in 1851, Herman Melville lamented to Nathaniel Hawthorne that he would go down in history as a "man who lived among the cannibals!" Until his death in 1891, Melville was known as the author of Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847)—both...

From the Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville, the first of a two-volume project constituting the fullest biography of Melville ever published.

Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Literature and Language

Finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize

Having left most of Moby-Dick with a printer in 1851, Herman Melville lamented to Nathaniel Hawthorne that he would go down in history as a "man who lived among the cannibals!" Until his death in 1891, Melville was known as the author of Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847)—both semiautobiographical travel books, and literary sensations because of Melville's sensual description of the South Sea islanders. (A transatlantic furor raged over whether the books were fact or fiction.) His most famous character was Fayaway—not Captain Ahab, not the White Whale, not Bartleby, and definitely not Billy Budd, whose story remained unpublished until 1924.

Herman Melville, 1819-1851 is the first of a two-volume project constituting the fullest biography of Melville ever published. Hershel Parker, co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, reveals with extraordinary precision the twisted turmoil of Melville's life, beginning with his Manhattan boyhood where, surrounded by tokens of heroic ancestors, he witnessed his father's dissipation of two family fortunes. Having attended the best Manhattan boys' schools, Herman was withdrawn from classes at the Albany Academy at age 12, shortly after his father's death. Outwardly docile, inwardly rebellious, he worked where his family put him—in a bank, in his brother's fur store—until, at age 21, he escaped his responsibilities to his impoverished mother and his six siblings and sailed to the Pacific as a whaleman.

A year and a half after his return, Melville was a famous author, thanks to the efforts of his older brother in finding publishers. Three years later he was married, the man of the family, a New Yorker—and still not equipped to do the responsible thing: write more books in the vein that had proven so popular. After the disappointing failure of Mardi, which he had hoped would prove him a literary genius, Melville wrote two more saleable books in four months—Redburn and White-Jacket. Early in 1850 he began work on Moby-Dick. Moving to a farmhouse in the Berkshires, he finished the book with majestic companions—Hawthorne a few miles to the south, and Mount Greylock looming to the north. Before he completed the book he made the most reckless gamble of his life, borrowing left and right (like his wastrel patrician father), sure that a book so great would outsell even Typee.

Melville lovers have known Hershel Parker as a newsbringer—from the shocking false report headlined "Herman Melville Crazy" to the tantalizing title of Melville's lost novel, The Isle of the Cross. Carrying on the late Jay Leyda's The Melville Log, Parker in the last decade has transcribed thousands of new documents into what will be published as the multi-volume Leyda-Parker The New Melville Log. Now, exploring the psychological narrative implicit in that mass of documents, Parker recreates episode after episode that will prove stunningly new, even to Melvilleans.

Reviews

Reviews

Unquestionably the most searching biography ever written on Herman Melville.

One of the most complete and staggeringly researched biographies of an American novelist ever published; it will certainly remain the undisputed standard Melville biography for many years to come... Parker's book does a fine job of bringing Melville's life up to date in the light of recent scholarship, as well as reinvigorating modern interest in a true American original.

Wonderful... Parker's study is an awesome achievement, indispensable for all serious Melvillians, with the vividness of a great Victorian novel and the precision of the finest historical scholarship.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
928
ISBN
9780801881855
Illustration Description
40 b&w illus.
Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
The Flight of the Patrician Wastrel and His Second Son: 1830
Herman Melvill's World, 1819–1830: Manhattan, Albany, Boston
"The Terrors of Death": Albany, 1831

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
The Flight of the Patrician Wastrel and His Second Son: 1830
Herman Melvill's World, 1819–1830: Manhattan, Albany, Boston
"The Terrors of Death": Albany, 1831–1832
The "Cholera Year":1832–1833
In the Shadow of the Young Furrier: Herman as Clerk, 1833–1835
Clerk, Farmer, Teacher, Polemicist: 1836–May 1838
Herman in Lansingburgh: Full-grown and Useless, May 1838–May 1839
Sailor and Schoolteacher: 1839–1840
West to Seek His Fortune: 1840
The First Year of Whaling: 1841
Whaler and Runaway: 1842
Beachcomber and Whaler: 1842–1843
Lahaina and Honolulu: 1843
Ordinary Seaman on the United States: 1843–1844
Home but Not Home: October 1844
The Sailor, the Orator, and the Grand Contested Election: 1844
The Sailor at the Writing Desk: 1844–1845
A Manuscript but No Publisher: 1845
A Modern Crusoe: 1846
International Author and the Man of the Family: 1846
The Resurrection of Toby: 1846
Winning Elizabeth Shaw and Winning the Harpers: 1846
Office-Seeker and Reviewer: 1847
Triumphant Author, Triumphant Lover: 1847
Scandal and Marriage: 1847
Newlyweds in New York City: 1847
Mardi as Island-Hopping Symposium:1847–1848
Dollars Be Damned: "The Red Year Forty-Eight"
Malcolm and the Face of Mardi: 1849
Redburn and White-Jacket: Summer 1849
London and a Peek at Continental Life: Fall 1849
The Breaching of Mocha Dick: January 1850
Hiding Out on the Cannibal Island: February–June 1850
Pittsfield and Hawthorne: June–7 August 1850
Hawthorne and His Mosses: 8 August–September 1850
Writing at Arrowhead: October 1850–Mid-January 1851
Damned By Dollars: Mid-January–1 May 1851
The Final Dash at The Whale: May–September 1851
Melville in Triumph: The Whale and the Kraken, September–November 1851Genealogical Charts
Documentation
Index

Author Bio
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Hershel Parker

Hershel Parker, H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the landmark Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (1967 and 2001) and Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville. His previous publications include Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons and Reading "Billy Budd." He is also editor of an edition of Melville's Pierre...
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