Herman Melville: A Biography

by Hershel Parker

Overview

From the Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville, the first of a two-volume project constituting the fullest biography of Melville ever published.

Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Literature and LanguageFinalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize

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was Fayaway--not Captain Ahab, not the White Whale, not Bartleby, and definitely not Billy Budd, whose story remained unpublished until 1924.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 Having attended the best Manhattan boys' schools, Herman was withdrawn from classes at the Albany Academy at age 12, shortly after his father's death.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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801881855
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	08/19/2005
Series:	Herman Melville Series , #1
Pages:	928
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.23(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Hershel Parker, H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the landmark Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (1967 and 2001) 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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
The Flight of the Patrician Wastrel and His Second Son: 1830
Herman Melvill's World, 1819–1830: Manhattan, Albany, Boston
"The Terrors of Death": Albany, 1831–1832
The "Cholera Year":1832–1833
In the Shadow of the Young Furrier: Herman as Clerk, 1833–1835
Clerk, Farmer, Teacher, Polemicist: 1836–May 1838
Herman in Lansingburgh: Full-grown and Useless, May 1838–May 1839
Sailor and Schoolteacher: 1839–1840
West to Seek His Fortune: 1840
The First Year of Whaling: 1841
Whaler and Runaway: 1842
Beachcomber and Whaler: 1842–1843
Lahaina and Honolulu: 1843
Ordinary Seaman on the United States: 1843–1844
Home but Not Home: October 1844
The Sailor, the Orator, and the Grand Contested Election: 1844
The Sailor at the Writing Desk: 1844–1845
A Manuscript but No Publisher: 1845
A Modern Crusoe: 1846
International Author and the Man of the Family: 1846
The Resurrection of Toby: 1846
Winning Elizabeth Shaw and Winning the Harpers: 1846
Office-Seeker and Reviewer: 1847
Triumphant Author, Triumphant Lover: 1847
Scandal and Marriage: 1847
Newlyweds in New York City: 1847
Mardi as Island-Hopping Symposium:1847–1848
Dollars Be Damned: "The Red Year Forty-Eight"
Malcolm and the Face of Mardi: 1849
Redburn and White-Jacket: Summer 1849
London and a Peek at Continental Life: Fall 1849
The Breaching of Mocha Dick: January 1850
Hiding Out on the Cannibal Island: February–June 1850
Pittsfield and Hawthorne: June–7 August 1850
Hawthorne and His Mosses: 8 August–September 1850
Writing at Arrowhead: October 1850–Mid-January 1851
Damned By Dollars: Mid-January–1 May 1851
The Final Dash at The Whale: May–September 1851
Melville in Triumph: The Whale and the Kraken, September–November 1851Genealogical Charts
Documentation
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A miracle of scholarship regarding Melville . . . a lifetime of research, but what a monument of otherwise irretrievable scholarship [Hershel has] left to posterity.
—Victor Strandberg, Duke University

John T. Irwin

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.

— David Laskin, Washington Post Book World
— John T. Irwin, Decker Professor in Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University

Victor Strandberg

A miracle of scholarship regarding Melville . . . a lifetime of research, but what a monument of otherwise irretrievable scholarship [Hershel has] left to posterity.

Harrison Hayford

A stunningly magnificent biography that displays the finest kind of sympathetic imagination. With 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.

Tony Kushner

The highest possible praise one can bestow on Hershel Parker's biography is that it is, in scope and in loving detail, Melvillian: a great, irresistible whale of a book, a crowning moment and a culmination—not simply of one worthy scholar's dedication and career, but of a whole century's efforts to reconstruct the life of a man possessed of a uniquely American kind of genius.

Editorial Reviews

As much as it is a critique of Melville studies and more specifically biographical study of Melville, this is a book about biography as a genre. Whilst it is not a manual for the budding biographer, this collection of insights, which explores the difficulties of taking on such an enormous, theoretically fraught task, will serve as a useful case study to anyone wishing to engage themselves as a chronicler of literary lives.
--The Year's Work in English Studies

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

Casts every earlier biography into shadows . . . Parker uses volumes of new information to give us a highly detailed, beautifully written, and moving portrait of a great writer.
--Library Journal (starred review)

Mr. Parker is the author of the most thorough and authoritative account of Melville's life ("Herman Melville: A Biography," published in two volumes, in 1996 and 2002). The capstone of five decades of research, textual editing and literary analysis, the work is a masterpiece of the biographer's art.
--Carl Rollyson, Wall Street Journal

Magisterial is the only word that adequately describes Hershel Parker's huge 940-page biography of Herman Melville . . . This detailed first installment incorporates many recently discovered manuscripts that allow the author to expand some events in Melville's life and offer several new episodes. Mr. Parker's investigation of Melville's complicated personality, his explanation of Melville's development as an artist, and his account of Melville's time are so complete that it would be impossible even to suggest the themes that run through this closely printed book. Certain to become the standard, and probably a classic.
--Lee Milazzo, Dallas Morning News

Monumental and meticulous, anchored in three decades of exhaustive research . . . Parker details how Melville lived and behaved as a complex human being, by turns flawed and brilliant, restless and focused . . . Parker's benchmark biography is also fascinating social history . . . The high point of Parker's first volume is his reconstruction of the Berkshire events of 1850-1851: Melville's meeting with Hawthorne, his impulsive buying of the 160-acre Brewster farm in Pittsfield, and the powerful letters and impressions shared by Melville and Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . Parker discovered that the two authors had a private dinner at a Lenox hotel, where Melville proudly handed his mentor a personal copy of the new novel, famously dedicated to Hawthorne's American 'genius.' It was the happiest event in Melville's life--and one of the most meaningful moments in American literary history. Parker makes it ours.
--R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., American Literature

One of the most complete and staggeringly researched biographies of an American novelist ever published; it will certainly remain the undisputed standard Melville biography for many years to come . . . Parker's book does a fine job of bringing Melville's life up to date in the light of recent scholarship, as well as reinvigorating modern interest in a true American original.
--Scott Bradfield, Times Higher Education Supplement

Professor Parker . . . is a sound, sensible biographer and so thorough that he will probably be accused of monumentality-- translation: unnecessary detail, such as which cousins attended whose wedding. The charge is not deserved. The detail matters . . . Professor Parker has had a vast amount of material to work with and has made good use of it. His life of Melville, which hurried readers may find over-inclusive, becomes a history of manners, amusements, business methods, politics, American whaling and international maneuverings in the South Seas, literary cliques, publishing practices, copyright law, and the erratic eccentricities of reviewers. When possible--and it frequently is--such information is presented with sly, deadpan humor. Melville emerges from this background as a man living and working in a real world full of real, amusing, brilliant, and sometimes rascally people. Well-chosen quotations establish that Melville himself was a charmer, a grand yarn-spinner, a wild driver, and a man who could describe a winter gale in the Berkshires as indicating 'too much sail on the house' and a need to 'go on the roof & rig in the chimney.' He was also, of course, a serious writer, steadily expanding his range and his thinking, and on the way to becoming the great writer who deserves all of Professor Parker's admirable work and all of a reader's attention.
--Phoebe-Lou Adams, Atlantic Monthly

The great merit of this biography is that its exhaustive research yields a wealth of fresh information about Melville's life. Parker gives us Melville at ground level.
--David S. Reynolds, Journal of American History

The linking of so much material into a continually engaging narrative is a magnificent achievement . . . Hershel Parker's magnum opus is a magisterial work of retrieval and unflagging scholarship, whose sheer diversity of detail adds human complexity to what earlier often seemed no more than an inert chronicle. It caps all previous endeavors. Whatever new discoveries are made (and there may be some surprises yet) will have to be built on his meticulous groundwork. He not only clarifies all known facts but demythologizes the fiction.
--Harold Beaver, Times Literary Supplement

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, David Laskin, Washington Post Book World

Unquestionably the most searching biography ever written on Herman Melville.
--Philip Weiss, New York Times Magazine

Wonderful . . . Parker's study is 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

From the Publisher

As much as it is a critique of Melville studies and more specifically biographical study of Melville, this is a book about biography as a genre. Whilst it is not a manual for the budding biographer, this collection of insights, which explores the difficulties of taking on such an enormous, theoretically fraught task, will serve as a useful case study to anyone wishing to engage themselves as a chronicler of literary lives.

The Year's Work in English Studies

Mr. Parker is the author of the most thorough and authoritative account of Melville's life ("Herman Melville: A Biography," published in two volumes, in 1996 and 2002). The capstone of five decades of research, textual editing and literary analysis, the work is a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

Wall Street Journal - Carl Rollyson

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.

David Laskin, Washington Post Book World - John T. Irwin

The great merit of this biography is that its exhaustive research yields a wealth of fresh information about Melville's life. Parker gives us Melville at ground level.

Journal of American History - David S. Reynolds

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

Monumental and meticulous, anchored in three decades of exhaustive research... Parker details how Melville lived and behaved as a complex human being, by turns flawed and brilliant, restless and focused... Parker's benchmark biography is also fascinating social history... The high point of Parker's first volume is his reconstruction of the Berkshire events of 1850-1851: Melville's meeting with Hawthorne, his impulsive buying of the 160-acre Brewster farm in Pittsfield, and the powerful letters and impressions shared by Melville and Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne... Parker discovered that the two authors had a private dinner at a Lenox hotel, where Melville proudly handed his mentor a personal copy of the new novel, famously dedicated to Hawthorne's American 'genius.' It was the happiest event in Melville's life—and one of the most meaningful moments in American literary history. Parker makes it ours.

American Literature - R. Bruce Bickley

Magisterial is the only word that adequately describes Hershel Parker's huge 940-page biography of Herman Melville... This detailed first installment incorporates many recently discovered manuscripts that allow the author to expand some events in Melville's life and offer several new episodes. Mr. Parker's investigation of Melville's complicated personality, his explanation of Melville's development as an artist, and his account of Melville's time are so complete that it would be impossible even to suggest the themes that run through this closely printed book. Certain to become the standard, and probably a classic.

Dallas Morning News - Lee Milazzo

Wonderful... Parker's study is an awesome achievement, indispensable for all serious Melvillians, with the vividness of a great Victorian novel and the precision of the finest historical scholarship.

Los Angeles Times Book Review - Robert Faggen

The linking of so much material into a continually engaging narrative is a magnificent achievement... Hershel Parker's magnum opus is a magisterial work of retrieval and unflagging scholarship, whose sheer diversity of detail adds human complexity to what earlier often seemed no more than an inert chronicle. It caps all previous endeavors. Whatever new discoveries are made (and there may be some surprises yet) will have to be built on his meticulous groundwork. He not only clarifies all known facts but demythologizes the fiction.

Times Literary Supplement - Harold Beaver

One of the most complete and staggeringly researched biographies of an American novelist ever published; it will certainly remain the undisputed standard Melville biography for many years to come... Parker's book does a fine job of bringing Melville's life up to date in the light of recent scholarship, as well as reinvigorating modern interest in a true American original.

Times Higher Education Supplement - Scott Bradfield

Professor Parker... is a sound, sensible biographer and so thorough that he will probably be accused of monumentality— translation: unnecessary detail, such as which cousins attended whose wedding. The charge is not deserved. The detail matters... Professor Parker has had a vast amount of material to work with and has made good use of it. His life of Melville, which hurried readers may find over-inclusive, becomes a history of manners, amusements, business methods, politics, American whaling and international maneuverings in the South Seas, literary cliques, publishing practices, copyright law, and the erratic eccentricities of reviewers. When possible—and it frequently is—such information is presented with sly, deadpan humor. Melville emerges from this background as a man living and working in a real world full of real, amusing, brilliant, and sometimes rascally people. Well-chosen quotations establish that Melville himself was a charmer, a grand yarn-spinner, a wild driver, and a man who could describe a winter gale in the Berkshires as indicating 'too much sail on the house' and a need to 'go on the roof & rig in the chimney.' He was also, of course, a serious writer, steadily expanding his range and his thinking, and on the way to becoming the great writer who deserves all of Professor Parker's admirable work and all of a reader's attention.

Atlantic Monthly - Phoebe-Lou Adams

Unquestionably the most searching biography ever written on Herman Melville.

New York Times Magazine - Philip Weiss

Will be an immensely valuable resource for generations to come. —New York Review of Books

Andrew Delbanco

If sheer bulk were enough to make a book definitive, respected Melville scholar Parker's encyclopedic but rather unwieldy biography would certainly be the one to beat. Covering Melville's life up to the completion (but not the actual publication) of Moby Dick, Parker presents an extensive look Melville's early years. His patrician family having been left destitute by an irresponsible father, the young Melville had to flee Manhattan with his family to avoid creditors. Naturally adventurous, and unable to finish his education due to lack of funds, Melville spent some five years at sea and abroad, experiences that yielded materials for nearly all of his writings. Parker does a very thorough job of delineating the realities of the literary marketplace of Melville's time, as well as Melville's public image as a licentious sexual outlaw for his portrayal of South Sea Islanders and the controversy over his unsympathetic portrayal of missionaries. He also explores the liberating influence of Hawthorne on Melville's sense of the possibilities for a national American literature. But Parker's thoroughness can be exhausting. In the absence of endnotes or footnotes, his text is stuffed with asides and trivial details that will be of interest only to the most dedicated of scholars. While Parker's literary insights are superior to those of Laurie Robertson-Lorant, whose biography of Melville was published in June of this year, Lorant's much more compact biography offers many of the same general insights on a vastly more accessible scale.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Parker's first magisterial volume of his projected two-volume work casts every earlier biography into shadows. Parker, who claims that Robertson-Lorant's use of the thousands of recently discovered Melville family documents was 'sporadic rather than exhaustive,' has used them to let us see a writer rather different from the one we thought we knew. Focusing less on Melville's social and intellectual milieu than does Robertson-Lorant, Parker uses the volumes of new information to give us a highly detailed, beautifully written, and moving portrait of a great writer, last seen in this volume presenting Hawthorne with Moby-Dick, the 1851 novel Melville dedicated to his friend. Parker speculates on how events in Melville's life work their way into his fiction. -- Charles C. Nash, Cottey College, Nevada, Missouri

Library Journal

Will be an immensely valuable resource for generations to come. -- New York Review of Books

Andrew Delbanco

This leviathan of a biography—the first half of a two-volume set—meticulously charts the early life and career of an erratic literary genius. Melville was born in 1819, a scion of new American gentry. Both of his grandfathers were revered Revolutionary War heroes, and both were wealthy. But in 1830 Melville's father went bankrupt and—in an episode that provides Parker (English/Univ. of Delaware) with a dramatic opening vignette—fled New York City in disgrace, soon to die a broken man. The remaining Melvilles spent the next 20 years pursuing financial and social redemption. Through a painstaking collation of letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and other evidence, Parker sets their struggle amid a vivid panorama of the young commercial republic, with its unprecedented opportunities and huge risks. Parker concentrates on Melville's adventures as a sailor and his subsequent transformation of his experiences into prose: first, the popular South Sea adventure tales Typee and Omoo, then the novels through Moby-Dick, published in 1851. But Parker also devotes significant space to Melville's family. A particular focus is older brother Gansevoort, whose peregrinations as a Democratic party rhetorician culminated in a government position in London, whence he helped launch Herman's career. Parker closes this volume with an examination of Melville's famous friendship with Hawthorne, to whom Moby-Dick was dedicated. Parker's lifetime of Melville scholarship has eventuated in his complete mastery of detail here, a mastery that shows to great effect. His portrait of Melville lets intricacies shine like a newly cleaned painting. But while Parkeroutlines the passions that characterized both Melville and his times, his generally reserved tone can take the edge off of them. Indispensable for all serious Melvillians, whether professional or amateur, but given its measured approach and its heft, not a likely avenue for the uninitiated.

Kirkus Reviews

Parker has constructed from his sources a painstaking chronology of Melville's life, practically on a day-by-day basis. To this, he adds a passion for Melville—both the brilliant works and the beleaguered man. And there are flashes of humor . . . Not all biographical subjects merit this level of attention. There's no disputing that Melville, one of America's greatest writers, does. Clearly, this monumental biography will prove indispensable to scholars and serious students of Melville. It contains much that may prove fascinating to the general reader as well.

San Francisco Chronicle - Martin Rubin

The publication of the second volume of Hershel Parker's biography of Herman Melville brings to a close an enterprise of archival and critical scholarship that has lasted forty years—nearly as long as Melville's writing career.

London Review of Books - Danny Karlin

The massive biography of Melville by Hershel Parker is an astonishing achievement. In two volumes of some two thousand large and tightly printed pages, Parker has overcome many of the obstacles that have stood, until now, in the way of a full-scale life . . . Parker has given every student of Melville a great gift—an incomparable sourcebook that will be plundered for years . . . This [the second volume] is a more powerful book than its predecessor—and sometimes it is downright gripping . . . An enormously illuminating account of . . . the context in which Herman Melville lived and worked . . . One is grateful for Parker's 'more than several pages.'.

New Republic - Andrew Delbanco

Melville's is a familiar story, but never before has it been told in such detailed complexity. An author praised initially for all the wrong reasons (Typee is far more than the adventure story and travel book it was taken to be), and then rejected for still worse ones, now emerges with a new clarity . . . His was, indeed, a posthumous life, but, thanks to Hershel Parker, one now more completely revealed in its personal triumphs and disasters.

Times Literary Supplement - Christopher Bigsby

For 40 years, Parker has been charting the seas of Melville's life, chasing down allusions and illusions . . . His quest yields some important discoveries . . . This is a biographical masterwork about a rare literary genius.

Cleveland Plain Dealer - Daniel Dyer

Through prodigious archival research, Parker creates a compelling narrative out of the last forty years of Melville's life, as he struggled with the spectre of failure . . . It is unlikely that a more searching or truthful biography of Melville will appear in the foreseeable future; the two volumes Parker has now published on one of America's finest writers are not only the fullest account we have of him but, quite probably, the final word.

Literary Review - Richard Gray

Parker's impressive scholarship and a vigorous analysis are cause for celebration. Too often reviewers misuse the word 'definitive'; not so in this case. The meticulous Parker has practically reconstructed Melville's DNA and in doing so has rendered American literature a signal service. Parker recounts Melville's chronic bad luck, epic writing binges, failed lectures, surreal visions and troubled marriage. It's a saga of genius refusing to be derailed. But Parker unearths a plethora of new material, including previously unknown family correspondence and even the title and plot of Melville's long-lost novel, The Isle of the Cross.

Los Angeles Times Book Review - Douglas Brinkley

Parker’s biography represents the ultimate achievement in Melville scholarship and offers the reader a mine of information on one of the formative American writers of the 19th century.

Comparative American Studies - David Seed

[A] matchless two-volume monument to the author's life and work. . .the greatest living authority on Melville [is] Hershel Parker.

Clearer

Hershel Parker set out to write the biography to end all biographies of Herman Melville, a book in which everything that could be known about the writer would be pieced out and put on record . . . Parker's first volume ends with Melville relishing the fruit of his impetuousness; the second shows him learning its price . . . Parker tells this story with a thoroughness that is scarcely to be believed . . . On tour de force is his reconstruction of the composition of Pierre . . . Equally interesting are Parker's surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive . . . Parker's other achievement is his reconstruction of Melville's family life . . . Parker's book has much to teach. In addition to the many episodes that he fills in or sets straight, he reminds us just how problematic writing was for Melville, how shrouded it was in personal risk and cost—and how stubbornly he kept at this work, even late in life, when he did it almost wholly in private . . . Parker also deserves credit for filling in the darker half of Melville's life without making it a melodrama of misunderstood genius . . . What we cannot know, but the main thing this book makes us wonder, is what different life Melville might have led and what different work he might have done if his talents had met with a different reception.

New York Times Book Review - Richard H. Brodhead