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Biography of Melville - His World and Work
Knopf
September 2005
448 pages ISBN: 0375403140 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
With Moby-Dick Herman Melville set the standard for the
Great American Novel, and with “Bartleby, the Scrivener,”
Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd he completed perhaps the
greatest oeuvre of any of our writers. Now Andrew Delbanco,
hailed by Time as “America’s best social critic,” uses
unparalleled historical and critical perspective to give us
both a commanding biography and a riveting portrait of the
young nation. The grandson of Revolutionary War heroes, Melville was born
into a family that in the fledgling republic had lost both
money and status. Half New Yorker, half New Englander, and
toughened at sea as a young man, he returned home to
chronicle the deepest crises of his era, from the
increasingly shrill debates over slavery through the
bloodbath of the Civil War to the intellectual and
spiritual revolution wrought by Darwin. Meanwhile, the New
York of his youth, where letters were delivered by
horseback messengers, became in his lifetime a city
recognizably our own, where the Brooklyn Bridge carried
traffic and electric lights lit the streets. Delbanco charts Melville’s growth from the bawdy
storytelling of Typee—the “labial melody” of his “indulgent
captivity” among the Polynesians—through the spiritual
preoccupations building up to Moby-Dick and such later
works as Pierre, or the Ambiguities and The Confidence-Man,
His Masquerade. And he creates a vivid narrative of a life
that left little evidence in its wake: Melville’s peculiar
marriage, the tragic loss of two sons, his powerful
friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and scores of literary
cronies, bouts of feverish writing, relentless financial
pressure both in the Berkshires and in New York, declining
critical and popular esteem, and ultimately a customs job
bedeviled by corruption. Delbanco uncovers autobiographical
traces throughout Melville’s work, even as he illuminates
the stunning achievements of a career that, despite being
consigned to obscurity long before its author’s death,
ultimately shaped our literature. Finally we understand why
the recognition of Melville’s genius—led by D. H. Lawrence
and E. M. Forster, and posthumous by some forty years—still
feels triumphant; why he, more than any other American
writer, has captured the imaginative, social, and political
concerns of successive generations; and why Ahab and the
White Whale, after more than a century and a half, have
become durably resounding symbols not only here but around
the world.
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