Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“The Private Melville is a delight to read. Wise, learned, witty, and thoughtful, it moves very smoothly even when it is covering tangled biographical and scholarly ground. In fact, it doesn’t read like a scholarly book at all, even though it is based on an extremely close and detailed and almost loving reading of sources, interpretations, and archival alluvia.”
—Giles Gunn,University of California, Santa Barbara
“The Private Melville is personal, even private (as the topic mandates), and idiosyncratic; it is opinionated and provocative. It contains no trace of fashionable jargon: where are the Poetics of Privacy? Instead, it proceeds from manuscript evidence and from texts of literary works. Young addresses a broad audience that will be eager to follow the seemingly random, indirect probings of a fine intellect in intense pursuit of disparate phases of Melvillean experience.”
—Hershel Parker,University of Delaware
