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Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade ReviewParker'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. -- Douglas Brinkley Los Angeles Times Book Review 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. -- Richard Gray Literary Review 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. -- Richard H. Brodhead New York Times Book Review 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. -- Christopher Bigsby Times Literary Supplement 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.'. -- Andrew Delbanco New Republic 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. -- Daniel Dyer Cleveland Plain Dealer With immense sympathy, Parker relates how Melville's intellectual growth resulted in his writing novels that were increasingly obscure to his ever-diminishing readership, and how, in his early 30s, as a husband and a father of four, his repeated failures curdled his spirit and caused him to withdraw into himself... Parker's telling makes a Greek tragedy of Melville's life after Moby-Dick, which included the suicide of his son Malcolm and the death of his young son Stanwix, his thankless work at the New York Custom House, his victimization at the hands of the Harper brothers, and his sinking into obscurity before his death... This definitive work, together with the first volume, is essential for every library. Library Journal (starred review) Such perseverance and painstaking historical detail surely make this biography the last word on Melville... For those who can't get enough of Melville-and they are a sizeable minority-this truly monumental achievement is the perfect book. Publishers Weekly The misery of [Melville's later] years is underscored by the most authoritative account of them ever: Herman Melville, A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891, by Hershel Parker. The book is 1,000 pages long, a generous monument of research that lovingly details Melville's reading and his family's activities, and seeks to uplift his poetry. -- Philip Weiss New York Observer 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. -- Martin Rubin San Francisco Chronicle [Parker's] exhaustive research yields a wealth of fresh information about Melville's life... We see in rich detail the comings and goings of Melville and his family, the vagaries of his literary reputation, and his shifting moods. -- David S. Reynolds Journal of American History 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. -- Danny Karlin London Review of Books 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. -- David Seed Comparative American Studies [A] matchless two-volume monument to the author's life and work...the greatest living authority on Melville [is] Hershel Parker. Clearer
Table of ContentsContents: Crowned and Blindsided, November-December 1851 "Mad Christmas" 1851 The Kraken Version of Pierre, November-December 1851 Melville Crosses the Rubicon, January 1852 Richard Bentley: The Whale and Pierre, January-May 1852 Fool's Paradise and the Furies Unleashed, June-September 1852 The Isle of the Cross, September 1852-June 1853 The Magazinist: Idealist Turned Would-Be Stoic, July1853 -January 1854 The Shift Away from Herman and Arrowhead, January-March 1854 Tortoises and Israel Potter, 1854 "Benito Cereno," Early 1855 The Confidence Man's Masquerade: Melville as National Satirist, June 1855-January 1856 Foreclosing on Friendship: Confession and Shame, February 1856-October 1856 Liverpool and the Levant, Late 1856-February 1857 Rome to Liverpool, and Home, February-April 1857 "Statues in Rome," May 1857-November 1858 "The South Seas," March 1858-Spring 1859 The Poet and the Last Lecture, "Travel," Summer 1859-Early 1860 An Epic Poet on the Meteor, May 1860-October 1860 The Dream of Florence, A State Funeral, and War, November 1860-December 1861 A Humble Quest for an Aesthetic Credo, January-April 1862 Farewell to Arrowhead and the Overthrow of Jehu, April-December 1862 Displacements, January-June 1863 Wartime Second Honeymoon & Manhattan for Good, Summer-Fall 1863 The War Poet's Scout Toward Aldie, 1864 Two Years of War and Dubious Peace, 1865-1866 Battle-Pieces: Poet, Poems, Reviewers, 1866 Domestic Life with a "Psychological Cerberus," 1867 A Snug Harbor for the Melvilles, Late 1867-1868 The Man Who had Known Hawthorne, 1869 West Street and "Jerusalem," 1870 The Last Mustering of the Clan, and "The Wilderness," 1871 Death, Death, and Flight to a Snug Harbor, 1872 A Family in Disarray; & "Mar Saba," 1873 The New Generation and "Bethlehem," 1874-1875 Clarel: Melville's Centennial Epic, 1876 "Old Fogy" and Imaginary Companions, 1877-1880 The Shadow at the Feasts, 1880-1885 Fragments in a Writing-Desk, 1886-1891 In and Out of the House of the Tragic Poet, 1886-1891
