Hershel Parker – författare

The text here is based on Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford’s 1967 edition, footnoted to include biographical discoveries. Reviews, letters by Melville and belated praise is collected, and a wealth of new biographical material has been added, while new research is highlighted. Parker also explores what writing Moby-Dick cost Melville and his family.

The Second Edition features significantly expanded explanatory annotations, particularly of biblical allusions."Contemporary Reviews" includes nineteen commentaries on The Confidence-Man, eight of them new to the Second Edition. Better understood today are the concerted attacks on Melville by, especially, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist reviewers.A new section, "Biographical Overviews," embodies the transformation of knowledge about Melville’s life that has occurred over the last three decades. This section provides a wide range of readings of Melville’s life by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dennis Marnon, and Hershel Parker, among others."Sources, Backgrounds, and Criticism" is thematically organized to inform readers about movements and social developments central to Melville’s America and to this novel, including utopias, cults, cure-alls, Transcendentalism, Indian hating, the Bible, and popular literature.A Selected Bibliography is also included.

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was Fayaway-not Captain Ahab, not the White Whale, not Bartleby, and definitely not Billy Budd, whose story remained unpublished until 1924.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.

The first volume of Hershel Parker's definitive biography of Herman Melville-a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize-closed on a mid-November day in 1851. In the dining room of the Little Red Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, Melville had just presented an inscribed copy of his new novel, Moby-Dick, to his intimate friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the man to whom the work was dedicated. "Take it all in all," Parker concluded, "this was the happiest day of Melville's life." Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 chronicles Melville's life in rich detail, from this ecstatic moment to his death, in obscurity, forty years later. Parker describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer bad luck that doomed Moby-Dick to failure (and its author to prolonged indebtedness), the savage reviews he received for his next book Pierre, and his inability to have the novel The Isle of the Cross-now lost-published at all. Melville turned to magazine fiction, writing the now-classic "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno," and produced a final novel, The Confidence Man, a mordant satire of American optimism.Over his last three decades, while working as a customs inspector in Manhattan, Melville painstakingly remade himself as a poet, crafting the centennial epic Clarel, in which he sorted out his complex feelings for Hawthorne, and the masterful story "Billy Budd," originally written as a prose headnote to an unfinished poem. Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. The 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.

This edition of ""Moby-Dick"", released in honour of the book's 150th anniversary, is the authoritative text of one of the world's great adventure stories. A crew of whalers set out in pursuit of a fierce white whale. Their names ring through the canon of American literature: Ishmael, the narrator; Queenqueg, a South Seas harpooner; Starbuck, the sober and serious chief mate; and above all Captain Ahab, part Faust and part Job, leading them to the ends of the earth - and the destiny he will share with his foe. In ""Moby-Dick"", Melville set out to write ""a mighty book"" on a ""mighty theme"". This text of ""Moby-Dick"" is an Approved Text of the Center for Scholarly Editions (Modern Language Association of America).

Almost from the time of its publication in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic in the literature of travel and adventure. Although initially rejected as too fantastic to be true, ""Typee"" was immensely popular and regarded in Melville's lifetime as his best work. It established his reputation as the literary discoverer of the South Seas and inspired the likes of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson. Two common sailors jump ship and are held in benign captivity by Polynesian natives. Through the narrator's eyes we see a literate (if romanticized) portrait of the people and their culture presented in vivid, even scientific, detail. Melville's racy style and irreverence towards Christian missionaries caused a scandal and critics denounced the narrator's suggestion that the native life might be superior to that of modern civilization. An adventure story above all, albeit one with a philosophical bent, ""Typee"" is a combination of elements that even early in Melville's career hinted at the towering ambition he would fulfill with ""Moby Dick"".

Melville’s long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville’s advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos and almost 18,000 lines about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville’s inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Clarel is one of the most complex theological explorations of faith and doubt in all of American literature, and this edition brings Melville’s poem to new life.

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker’s history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by his intimate working relationships with great Melvilleans, dead and living. The first part is a mesmerising autobiographical account of what went into creating his award-winning two-volume life of Herman Melville. Next, Parker traces six decades the persistent war New Critics have waged against biographical scholarship on Melville. American literary critics, he finds, impose New Critical theories of organic unity on Melville’s disrupted career even while truncating his body of work and minimising his aesthetic interests. Parker celebrates the ""divine amateurs"" who use new technology to discover dazzling Melville stories and also lauds the writers of literature blogs as potential redeemers of academic and mainstream media reviewing. In the third part, Parker invites readers into his biographical workshop and challenges them with ambitious research assignments. Throughout this bold book, Parker seeks to reinvigorate the all-but-lost art of scholarly literary criticism and biography.