Herman Melville by Hershel Parker
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.
"A stunningly magnificent biography that displays the finest kind of sympathetic imaginationWith this first volume, Hershel Parker has become, quite simply, 'the' most important Melville scholar of all time. Beyond any doubt, this will be the standard biography of Melville for many decades to come."--Harrison Hayford, general editor of 'The Writings of Herman Melville' "This biography will be definitive. Impeccable in its scholarship, 'Herman Melville' reads like a good novel. Parker moves across the material with an ease born of absolute mastery of the facts and a storyteller's sense of dramatic detail."--John T. Irwin, Decker Professor in Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University "As this first of a projected two-volume biography makes abundantly clear, Melville's life is above all else an enthralling tale of literary genius in the act of self-creation. Hershel Parker is a scholar of notable fastidiousness, and his achievement here is to establish Herman Melville's life as one of the great literary family sagas of the nineteenth century -- a narrative at least as colorful and incident-rich as anything published by Melville himself."--Literary Review "A monumental achievement...The fullest account of the writer ever published. Its scholarship is impeccable, its prose clear and swift, its scope awe-inspiring."--Washington Post Book World
Hershel Parker, H. Fletcher Brown Professor in the Department of English at the University of Delaware, is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the landmark 1967 Norton Critical Edition of 'Moby-Dick' and Associate General Editor of 'The Writings of Herman Melville'. His previous publications include 'Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons' and 'Reading "Billy Budd."' He is also editor of an edition of Melville's 'Pierre' (1995), illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780801854286 |
| ISBN 10 | 0801854288 |
| Title | Herman Melville |
| Author | Hershel Parker |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Year published | 1996-12-23 |
| Number of pages | 928 |
| Prizes | Winner of PROSE Award for Best Book in Literature and Language 1997 (United States), Short-listed for Pulitzer Prize in Letters 1997 (United States) |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |