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Authors
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
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The Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville (1968– ), edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, is standard. Textual discoveries reported in the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (1967), edited by Hayford and Parker, went into the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick (1988). The best documentary source for studying Melville’s masterpiece is now the Parker-Hayford revised Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2001), which contains much new information. Dan McCall has a Norton Critical Edition of Melville’s Short Novels (2002). Jay Leyda’s monumental compilation of documents, The Melville Log (1951; reprinted 1969, with a supplement), is being expanded by Parker. Parker’s monumental twovolume Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819– 1851 (1996) and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851–1891 (2002) supersedes all previous biographies. For an excellent shorter life, see Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work (2005). Stanton Garner’s The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993) remains of great value, and the “Historical Notes” in the Northwestern-Newberry volumes contain essential biographical, historical, and textual scholarship. Nineteenth-century biographical accounts are reprinted and analyzed in Merton M. Sealts Jr.’s The Early Lives of Melville (1974). Sealts’s Melville’s Reading (1988), primarily a list of books known to have been in Melville’s possession, should be supplemented by Mary K. Bercaw’s Melville’s Sources (1987). Newly discovered books from Melville’s library are discussed in Parker’s biography. Kevin Hayes and Parker edited A Checklist of Melville Reviews (1991). Brian Higgins and Parker compiled Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (1995). Basic research tools are Higgins’s Herman Melville: An Annotated Bibliography, 1846–1930 (1979) and Herman Melville: A Reference Guide, 1931–1960 (1987). See also Gail H. Coffler’s Melville’s Allusions to Religion: A Comprehensive Index and Glossary (2002). Edited collections of critical essays and reviews provide excellent introductions to a range of Melville criticism; see Parker and Hayford’s “Moby-Dick” as Doubloon (1970), John Bryant’s A Companion to Melville Studies (1986), Robert Milder’s Critical Essays on Melville’s “Billy Budd, Sailor” (1989), Robert Burkholder’s Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1992), Higgins and Parker’s Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” (1992), Myra Jehlen’s Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays (1994), John Bryant and Robert Milder’s Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays (1997), Robert S. Levine’s The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (1998), Donald Yannella’s New Essays on “Billy Budd” (2002), Giles Gunn’s A Historical Guide to Herman Melville (2005), Wyn Kelly’s A Companion to Herman Melville (2006), and John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw, and Timothy Marr’s Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick (2006). Visually stunning and illuminating are Robert K. Wallace’s Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (1992) and Elizabeth A. Schultz’s Unpainted to the Last: “Moby-Dick” and Twentieth-Century American Art (1995). Among the most influential recent works in Melville studies are Waichee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (1989), John Bryant’s Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (1993), Wyn Kelley’s Melville’s City (1996), Sheila Post- Lauria’s Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace 1996), Elizabeth Renker’s Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (1996), Samuel Otter’s Melville’s Anatomies (1999), and Robert Milder’s Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (2006).
Herman Melville's father was a New York City merchant who, when he died suddenly, left his family heavily in debt. Melville was only twelve at the time, but he was forced to leave school to go to work. After a variety of jobs in his teens, Melville joined a whaler sailing for the South Seas in 1841. On that trip, Melville and a crewmate jumped ship and lived for several weeks with a native tribe; upon his return to America, Melville transformed that experience into Typee (1846), a popular adventure tale that established him as a literary celebrity. A sequel, Omoo, soon followed, but Melville's appeal was dampened by his more philosophical works such as Mardi (1849), Pierre (1853), and even Moby-Dick (1851). Critics of these novels declared Melville unbalanced, and Melville had to struggle to regain the economic and critical popularity he had enjoyed with his earlier writing. After Pierre, he primarily wrote short stories for magazines like Harper's. Financial concerns burdened the family for years, but an inheritance late in life allowed Melville to work on his final masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor. Only after his death did Melville rise from the ranks of second-rate adventure novelists to his present status as one of the most important American writers.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
The Moby-Dick excerpts in NAAL are selected to give you an experience of the novel's energy, intellectual reach, and array of compelling characters. Published in 1851, this freewheeling narrative was all but forgotten at the time of Melville's death forty years later. But generations of modern novelists have looked to it as a milestone in the liberation and expansion of American fiction and the achievement of a lively vernacular style on the printed page, a style that still resonates with democratic values and aspirations.
1. Read chapter I and describe Ishmael's personality and how his mind seems to move and work. As he moves through his experiences, what appeals to him? What is his attitude toward big value systems--religious, cultural, intellectual, political? Do you find him a plausible human being? Why or why not?
2. Hundreds of pages have been published about symbolism in this novel. Rather than decode the symbols again, can you talk about Moby-Dick as being "about" a wish to read the world symbolically, to find signs and meanings in worldly experience? In other words, do Ahab's and Ishmael's symbol hunting and symbol finding tell us something about their temperaments, intellectual and psychological habits, and core beliefs?
