Winner of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Biography and AutobiographySelected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book of the Year for 2003DescriptionThe 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 Crossnow lostpublished 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 Americanartist.From reviews of the first volume:''Unquestionably the most searching biography ever written on Herman Melville.''Philip Weiss, New York Times Magazine''A magnificent achievement . . . Hershel Parker's magnum opus is a magisterial work of retrieval and unflagging scholarship.''Harold Beaver, Times Literary Supplement''An awesome achievement, indispensable for all serious Melvillians, with the vividness of a great Victorian novel and the precision of the finest historical scholarship.''Robert Faggen, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Contents:
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
""[A] matchless two-volume monument to the author's life and work...the greatest living authority on Melville [is] Hershel Parker.""
