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...

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...