Herman Melville wrote out of a strong creative impulse closely tied to an even more imperative will to survive, to resist the ravages of despair and the urge toward self-annihilation that grew out of an all-too-clear vision of the world he saw around him. In his novels Melville wrote of this struggle to survive in a harsh, unyielding world, creating characters such as Ahab and Pierre, who thrash about blindly because of self-ignorance, and characters such as Ishmael and the confidence man, who seek instead the calm and the power that lie at the center of man's being.

The final work in...

This study treats comprehensively the sixteen short works of fiction that Herman Melville wrote between 1853 and 1856, most of which were published in "Harper's" and "Putnam's" magazines. Concentrating on the writer's two basic motivations for writing as he did in these stories, Dillingham argues that Melville created a surface of almost inane congeniality in many of the works, an illusion of vapidity that camouflages a profundity often missed by his readers. He sought to to hide disturbing themes because the magazines for which he was writing would almost certainly have rejected his...

Herman Melville is a towering figure in American literature--arguably the country's greatest nineteenth-century writer. Revising a number of entrenched misunderstandings about Melville in his later years, this is a remarkable and unprecedented account of the aged author giving himself over to a life of the mind. Focusing exclusively on a period usually associated with the waning of Melville's literary powers, William B. Dillingham shows that he was actually concentrating and intensifying his thoughts on art and creativity to a greater degree than ever before.

Biographers have written...

"An Artist in the Rigging" is a study of Herman Melville's early novels--"Typee," "Omoo," "Mardi," "Redburn," and "White-Jacket." The author considers these fictions from the standpoint of thematic relationship rather than of chronological development. He shows that while the five hero-narrators are separate and distinct entities, they have much in common and can be seen as representing different facets of an emergent composite hero-from the sensitive and restless young man who leaves home to search hungrily for experience, to the wanderer immersed in a deep probing of himself and his...