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

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

Overview

"Here is Melville at his most inspired and numinous; every perfervid yet finely honed paragraph is a philosophy, recalling Shelley's essays. [...] Niemeyer's probing and nuanced introduction dissects the controversies over Melville's feelings toward Hawthorne and situates the letters and the other works within this unresolved context. [...] Niemeyer's volume provides an invaluable reminder of Melville's philosophical fecundity, seeded by Hawthorne's inspiring and enigmatic influence." -- David Greven, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780990691754
Publisher:	Orison Books
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Pages:	106
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

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