"Contemporary Reviews" includes nineteen commentaries onThe Confidence-Man, eight of them new to the Second Edition. Better understood today are the concerted attacks on Melville by, especially, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist reviewers. A new section, "Biographical Overviews," embodies the transformation of knowledge about Melville's life that has occurred over the last three decades. This section provides a wide range of readings of Melville's life by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dennis Marnon, and Hershel Parker, among others "Sources, Backgrounds, and Criticism" is...
"Contemporary Reviews" includes nineteen commentaries onThe Confidence-Man, eight of them new to the Second Edition. Better understood today ...
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...
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 ...
The first volume of Hershel Parker's definitive biography of Herman Melville--a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize--closed on a mid-November day in 1851. In the dining room of the Little Red Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, Melville had just presented an inscribed copy of his new novel, Moby-Dick, to his intimate friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the man to whom the work was dedicated. -Take it all in all, - Parker concluded, -this was the happiest day of Melville's life.-
Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 chronicles Melville's life in rich detail, from this...
The first volume of Hershel Parker's definitive biography of Herman Melville--a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize--closed on a mid-November day ...
An evaluation of the importance of textual criticism in evaluation of important literary works, based on his study of important American literary works by authors such as James, Crane, and Mailer.
An evaluation of the importance of textual criticism in evaluation of important literary works, based on his study of important American literary work...
This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces. The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and...
This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of h...
The letters by and to Melville in this volume extend from letters he wrote at the age of nine in 1828 to ones he sent and received during the year before his death at seventy-two in 1891. To fill the gaps within the correspondence, 542 editorial entries are chronologically interspersed for letters both by and to Melville for which no full text has been located but for which some evidence survives. This scholarly edition presents a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting or other surviving evidence permits. Fifty-two newly discovered letters by Melville, more...
The letters by and to Melville in this volume extend from letters he wrote at the age of nine in 1828 to ones he sent and received during the year bef...
Herman Melville wrote White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his memories of naval life, having spent fourteen months as an ordinary seaman aboard a frigate as it sailed the Pacific and made the homeward voyage around Cape Horn. Already that same summer Melville had written Redburn, and he regarded the books as "two jobs, which I have done for money--being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood." The reviewers were not as hard on White-Jacket as Melville himself was. The English...
Herman Melville wrote White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War during two months of intense work in the summer of 1849. He drew upon his mem...
Almost from the time of its publication in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic in the literature of travel and adventure. Although initially rejected as too fantastic to be true, Typee was immensely popular and regarded in Melville's lifetime as his best work. It established his reputation as the literary discoverer of the South Seas and inspired the likes of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson. Two common sailors jump ship and are held in benign captivity by Polynesian natives. Through the narrator's eyes we...
Almost from the time of its publication in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic i...
Melville s long poem "Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land" (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville s advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos and almost 18,000 lines about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions. But modern critics have found "Clarel" a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of "The Waste Land. "It abounds with revelations of Melville s inner life....
Melville s long poem "Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land" (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth centu...