9780801868924
Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891
Hershel Parker
ISBN 13: 9780801868924
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr
Publication Date: 2002
Binding: Hardcover
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A second volume in the acclaimed biography chronicles Melville's life from the conclusion of Moby Dick to his death forty years later, documenting the negative reviews that overshadowed his work, his decision to turn to magazine fiction, and his achievements as a poet, as culled from family letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles.
Review:
"Grateful scholars will chew over this massive undertaking in years to come, as they should, saluting Parker for his devotion, solemnity and sheer stamina. As for Melville the man: As Ishmael presciently remarks in MOBY-DICK: "I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face'."
Brenda Wineapple, Nation, 05/20/2002
Review:"Parker's biography, a state-of-the-art compilation of all known facts (many of them appearing for the first time), suffers somewhat from a diffusion of perspective....Parker's biography succeeds because its subject is large enough to encompass yet another Herman Melville, and doubtless others to come."
Guy Davenport, Harper's, June 2002
Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891: Search Results
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Herman Melville: A Biography - Volume 2, 1851-1891. (ISBN: 0801868920 / 0-8018-6892-0) Parker, Hershel Quantity Available: > 20
Book Description: Book Condition: New. BRAND NEW. Bookseller Inventory # CCCC11745 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (ISBN: 0801868920 / 0-8018-6892-0) Parker, Hershel Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr, 2002. Hardcover. Book Condition: New. Brand new unopened hardback w/ jacket; crisp, clean, tight. Bookseller Inventory # ABE-7516840193 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Herman Melville: 1851-1891 v.2: A Biography (Hardback) (ISBN: 9780801868924) Parker, Hershel Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS, United States, 2002. Hardback. Book Condition: New. 235 x 155 mm. Brand New Book with Free Worldwide Delivery. 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." This second volume chronicles Melville's life from this ecstatic moment to his death, in obscurity, 40 years later. Parker describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer bad luck that doomed Moby-Dick to failure (and its author to prolonged indebtedness), the savage reviews he received for his next book "Pierre", and his inability to have the novel "The Isle of the Cross" - now lost - published at all. Melville turned to magazine fiction, writing the now-classic "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno," and produced a final novel, "The Confidence Man", a mordant satire of American optimism.Over his last three decades, while working as a customs inspector in Manhattan, Melville painstakingly remade himself as a poet, crafting the centennial epic "Clarel", in which he sorted out his complex feelings for Hawthorne, and the masterful story "Billy Budd," originally written as a prose headnote to an unfinished poem. Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode previously unknown. Bookseller Inventory # FLT9780801868924 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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