{"title":"Hershel Parker","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"herman-melville-book-hershel-parker-9780801881862","title":"Herman Melville","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49872249749777,"sku":"CIN0801881862VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801881862.jpg?v=1750980373"},{"product_id":"melville-biography-book-hershel-parker-9780810127098","title":"Melville Biography","description":"Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker’s history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by his intimate working relationships with great Melvilleans, dead and living. The first part is a mesmerising autobiographical account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume life of Herman Melville. Next, Parker traces six decades the persistent war New Critics have waged against biographical scholarship on Melville. American literary critics, he finds, impose New Critical theories of organic unity on Melville’s disrupted career even while truncating his body of work and minimising his aesthetic interests. Parker celebrates the \"\"divine amateurs\"\" who use new technology to discover dazzling Melville stories and also lauds the writers of literature blogs as potential redeemers of academic and mainstream media reviewing. In the third part, Parker invites readers into his biographical workshop and challenges them with ambitious research assignments. Throughout this bold book, Parker seeks to reinvigorate the all-but-lost art of scholarly literary criticism and biography.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49970257756433,"sku":"CIN0810127091VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0810127091.jpg?v=1763484240"},{"product_id":"herman-melville-book-hershel-parker-9780801854286","title":"Herman Melville","description":"This is the first volume of a two-volume project which provides a biography of Melville. The author reveals the ups, downs and impasses of Melville's life, from his patrician birth in New York to the publication of \"Moby Dick, or The Whale\" in 1851. Born to an aristocratic father with a taste for luxury but no instinct for his business as an importer of French dry goods, Melville grew up taking his patrician condition for granted. But when only 11 years old, he helped his father hustle the family furniture out of town to save it from seizure by creditors. The fragility of wealth and status, and the gap between appearance and truth had become all too clear. After the death of Melville's father in 1832, the widow and eight children experienced humiliating dependency. Herman's older brother became the man of the family, and Herman passed his boyhood in confining office work broken by stretches of worried idleness and fruitless job hunting until he went to sea - first, briefly, in 1839, then to the Pacific as a whaleman in 1841. When he returned home with a book to write, Herman, reenacting the familiar financial strains of his childhood, made a living from his writing no better than his father had done as a merchant. A scholar of Melville's life, works and milieu, Parker starts by pinpointing the facts of Melville's life. More important, he pulls those facts together, making sense of their manifold implications, and recreating the scenes, moods, attitudes and atmospheres through which Meville moved.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50096156901649,"sku":"CIN0801854288G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50182604718353,"sku":"CIN0801854288A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53420020105489,"sku":"CIN0801854288VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801854288.jpg?v=1750980339"},{"product_id":"herman-melville-book-hershel-parker-9780801881855","title":"Herman Melville","description":"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 definitely not Billy Budd, whose story remained unpublished until 1924. Herman Melville, 1819-1851 is the first of a two-volume project constituting the fullest biography of Melville ever published. Hershel Parker, co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, reveals with extraordinary precision the twisted turmoil of Melville's life, beginning with his Manhattan boyhood where, surrounded by tokens of heroic ancestors, he witnessed his father's dissipation of two family fortunes. Having attended the best Manhattan boys' schools, Herman was withdrawn from classes at the Albany Academy at age 12, shortly after his father's death. Outwardly docile, inwardly rebellious, he worked where his family put him-in a bank, in his brother's fur store-until, at age 21, he escaped his responsibilities to his impoverished mother and his six siblings and sailed to the Pacific as a whaleman. A year and a half after his return, Melville was a famous author, thanks to the efforts of his older brother in finding publishers. Three years later he was married, the man of the family, a New Yorker-and still not equipped to do the responsible thing: write more books in the vein that had proven so popular. After the disappointing failure of Mardi, which he had hoped would prove him a literary genius, Melville wrote two more saleable books in four months-Redburn and White-Jacket. Early in 1850 he began work on Moby-Dick. Moving to a farmhouse in the Berkshires, he finished the book with majestic companions-Hawthorne a few miles to the south, and Mount Greylock looming to the north. Before he completed the book he made the most reckless gamble of his life, borrowing left and right (like his wastrel patrician father), sure that a book so great would outsell even Typee. Melville lovers have known Hershel Parker as a newsbringer-from the shocking false report headlined \"Herman Melville Crazy\" to the tantalizing title of Melville's lost novel, The Isle of the Cross. Carrying on the late Jay Leyda's The Melville Log, Parker in the last decade has transcribed thousands of new documents into what will be published as the multi-volume Leyda-Parker The New Melville Log. Now, exploring the psychological narrative implicit in that mass of documents, Parker recreates episode after episode that will prove stunningly new, even to Melvilleans.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50331989541137,"sku":"CIN0801881854VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007243125009,"sku":"NIN9780801881855","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51735092166929,"sku":"GOR009802668","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52400711467281,"sku":"NLS9780801881855","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801881854.jpg?v=1751075944"},{"product_id":"herman-melville-book-hershel-parker-9780801868924","title":"Herman Melville","description":"This second in a two-volume biography of Herman Melville tracks his life from the moment of his handing over of a copy of Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne to his death in obscurity 40 years later. The author describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer back luck that doomed Melville to failure.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52549570593041,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52549573837073,"sku":"CIN0801868920G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780801868924.jpg?v=1760699117"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-hershel-parker.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}