The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne

by Herman Melville, Mark Niemeyer (Editor), Paul Harding (Foreword by)

Overview

If you don't know Melville's letters to Hawthorne, you don't know Melville. These letters are full of passion, humor, doubt, and spiritual yearning, and offer an intimate view of Melville's personality. Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy. The Divine Magnet will provide the general literary public as well as the college classroom with a reliable and beautifully produced volume of Melville's letters to Hawthorne, along with supplemental material, highlighting the relationship between these luminaries of American letters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780990691761
Publisher:	Orison Books
Publication date:	07/19/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	90
File size:	312 KB

About the Author

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Date of Birth:

August 1, 1819

Date of Death:

September 28, 1891

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended the Albany Academy in Albany, New York, until age 15

Editorial Reviews

03/21/2016
The 10 letters collected in this volume, all written between 1851 and 1852, chronicle, albeit one-sidedly, one of the most consequential relationships in American letters. Herman Melville had met Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850 and recognized him instantly as a literary soulmate. Melville's letters (Hawthorne's have been lost) show a rapport and intimacy that go beyond simple mutual respect. Anticipating a visit by his correspondent—who at the time lived only six miles away in Massachussetts's Berkshire Mountains—he chortles, "We will have mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling & crack jokes & bottles from morning till night." Having just read The House of the Seven Gables, published in 1851, he insightfully lauds Hawthorne's skill at rendering "the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings." Melville, then at work on "my Whale"—Moby-Dick, which he would dedicate to Hawthorne—is also uncommonly frank, in a letter from May 1851, about the literary renown that eludes him: "I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities." The appendices, which include Melville's review of Hawthorne's story collection Mosses from an Old Manse and two poems by Melville thought to be about Hawthorne, enhance this portrait of friendship between two literary titans. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly