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The confidence-man and alchemy -- Keeping true: Billy Budd, sailor.
Herman Melville is a towering figure in American literature--arguably the country's greatest nineteenth-century writer. Revising a number of entrenched misunderstandings about Melville in his later years, this is a remarkable and unprecedented account of the aged author giving himself over to a life of the mind. Focusing exclusively on a period usually associated with the waning of Melville's literary powers, William B. Dillingham shows that he was actually concentrating and intensifying his thoughts on art and creativity to a greater degree than ever before. Biographers have written little about Melville's deceptively "quiet" years after the publication of the long poem Clarel in 1876 and before his death in 1891. It was a time when he saw few friends or acquaintances, answered most of his letters as briefly as possible, and declined most social invitations. But for Melville, as for Emily Dickinson, such outward appearances belied an intense, engaged inner life. If for no other reason, Dillingham reminds us, this period merits more discerning attention because it was then that Melville produced Billy Budd as well as an impressive number of new and revised poems--while working full-time as a customs inspector for more than half of those years. What sustained Melville during that final period of ill health and near-poverty, says Dillingham, was his "circle," not of close friends but of works by a number of writers that he read with appreciative, yet discriminating, affinity, including Matthew Arnold, James Thomson, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Honore de Balzac. Dillingham relates these readings to Melville's own poetry and prose and to a rich variety of largely underappreciated topics relevant to Melville's later life, from Buddhism, the School of Pessimism, and New York intellectual life to Melville's job at the ever-corrupt customs house, his fear of disgrace and increased self-absorption, and his engagement with both the picturesque and the metaphorical power of roses in art and literature. This portrait of the great writer's final years is at once a biography, an intellectual history, and a discerning reading of his mature work. By showing that Melville's isolation was a conscious intellectual decision rather than a psychological quirk, Melville and His Circle reveals much that is new and challenging about Melville himself and about our notions of age and the persistence of imagination and creativity.
A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review
This volume presents Melville's three known journals. Unlike his contemporaries Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Melville kept no habitual record of his days and thoughts; each of his three journals records his actions and observations on trips far from home. In this edition's Historical Note, Howard C. Horsford places each of the journals in the context of Melville's career, discusses its general character, and points out the later literary uses he made of it, notably in Moby-Dick, Clarel, and his magazine pieces. The editors supply full annotations of Melville's allusions and terse entries and an exhaustive index makes available the range of his acquaintance with people, places, and works of art. Also included are related documents, illustrations, maps, and many pages and passages reproduced from the journals. This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as his difficult handwriting permits. It is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
This study treats comprehensively the sixteen short works of fiction that Herman Melville wrote between 1853 and 1856, most of which were published in Harper's and Putnam's magazines. Concentrating on the writer's two basic motivations for writing as he did in these stories, Dillingham argues that Melville created a surface of almost inane congeniality in many of the works, an illusion of vapidity that camouflages a profundity often missed by his readers. He sought to to hide disturbing themes because the magazines for which he was writing would almost certainly have rejected his attempts to be more direct. Dillingham's method is not, however, confined to a reading of the texts. Melville's stories contain so many allusions to the contemporary scene that they constitute in themselves a cultural study. An important contribution of Melville's Short Fiction is its discussion of these allusions. Finally, Dillingham examines the relationship between the short fiction and Melville's own life. Much of the writer's frustration and struggle is concealed in these early works. Melville's friendship with Hawthorne, for example, an intense and yet in some ways disappointing relationship for both men, is explored as an important influence on several of the stories.
This book explores the writings of Herman Melville across his career and examines the distinctive qualities of his style.
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Originally published to promote his French translation of Moby-Dick, Jean Giono's Melville: A Novel is an astonishing literary compound of fiction, biography, personal essay, and criticism. In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel’s challenge—to express man’s fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece. Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essay, Melville: A Novel—part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile’s expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle. Paul Eprile was a co-winner of the French-American Foundation's 2018 Translation Prize for his translation of Melville.
If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.