Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 2, 1851-1891) - Softcover

Parker, Hershel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801881862 ISBN 13: 9780801881862

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005

Synopsis

Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Biography and Autobiography

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003

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 ecstatic moment to his death, in obscurity, forty 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 vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. The concluding volume of Herman Melville: A Biography confirms Hershel Parker's position as the world's leading Melville scholar, demonstrating his unrivaled biographical, literary, and historical imagination and providing a rich new portrait of a great―and profoundly American―artist.

About this title

Book Description:

The definitive life of the great American writer concludes, chronicling Melville's achievement and courage after the critical and commercial failure of Moby-Dick.

From the Publisher:

"An awesome achievement, indispensable for all serious Melvillians, with the vividness of a great Victorian novel and the precision of the finest historical scholarship."—Robert Faggen, Los Angeles Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0801881862
• ISBN 13: 9780801881862
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1056