Customer Reviews

Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 1, 1819-1851)

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Hershel Parker's credentials as a Melville scholar are unimpeachable--he's co-edited the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry edition of the complete works and seems to have eaten, slept, and breathed Melville for decades. Despite his daunting c.v., however, his massive, half-finished biography is eminently readable and entertaining.

While it would be impossible to depict a writer's life without addressing his or her work, the focus here is on the events of Melville's life, not his books. The fascinating national and family politics that preoccupied him are on particularly fine display. Readers with only a casual interest might see some details as mere minutiae, but each cited incident enriches the portrait of a complex man and artist.

Melville's history is not nearly so well documented as that of some of his contemporaries, so there is some educated guesswork regarding certain motives and details, but Parker is ever scrupulous about separating evidence from speculation. His immersion in Melville's work and his sympathetic understanding of the man make this volume the most trustworthy and complete biography available.

If you approach this work with a right understanding, that is a biography and not an interpretation of the works of Herman Melville, then you should honestly be able to rate it as top-notch. What some might call " disappointments " in what they learn about Melville; his family life, they way he behaved at times, and the manner in which he wrote his books, are to me, the lens by which we see more clearly the humanity of the man. Mr. Parker's work might seem too weighty for some, but I can't wait for Volume Two.

This, the first volume of the most comprehensive of all the biographies of Herman Melville, is written for anyone wanting to know anything and everything about the renowned author's life (rather than his writings). Its detail is exhaustive - in more ways than one. Therefore it is not an especially enjoyable book for the casual reader but serves as an excellent resource for researchers.

A more enjoyable read, although it is still long, is Laurie Robertson-Lorant's "Melville, A Biography."

Still, Parker's work is an amazing feat of scholarship and should be in the library of any serious student, or fan, of Herman Melville.

- Lynn Michelsohn, co-author of "In the Galapagos Islands with Herman Melville"

A very long and detailed Melville biography. I appreciated the fact that it didn't devote much space to interpretations of the body of Melville's work. There's an awful lot of interpretive criticism already out there, and we didn't need more in a biography. If you're already a Melville fanatic and are really interested in whether Melville actually worked briefly at a bowling alley in Hawaii as a pin setter (the novel that he never wrote) or how he travelled on his honeymoon, you'll want to read this. If you haven't gotten much beyond one or two readings of Moby-Dick - that is if you haven't yet read Typee, Omoo, Whitejacket, Pierre, The Confidence Man - and still want to read the man's biography, I'd go for a more concise one than this. And the best news of all (for all Sub-Subs) is that Volume 2 is now available!

I bought this book expecting a great deal more from it. I use Edgar Johnson's superb life of Charles Dickens as a measure of any literary biography, and this does not match up. Johnson took great care to not only delve into the important facts of Dickens' life, but to pause and carefully weave Dickens' works into his life, so that one reflected the other. What Parker has produced is an almost morbid recitation of not only the minute details of Melville's life, but those of his family, friends and even his fleeting acquaintances. Most disappointing is that in the midst of this catalog of mid-19th century goings-on, the wonderful works that give the man his importance to us get lost. We are told why he wrote them, what his sources were, what everybody thought of them, how much he got paid for them, but nothing about what they themselves are, or what their significance is. Perhaps Parker, as an editor of Melville's works, feels that we need only cross-reference to his previous publications. I don't think that anyone hefting a 900 page first volume of a projected two expects to have to cross-reference to anything. This book will probably be the ultimate source for college English papers for decades to come, but that doesn't make it much of a read

A huge biography, too huge for its own good. It covers the years from Melville's birth in 1819 up to the publication of MOBY DICK in 1851. Parker seems to have tracked down every move in Melville's life, but curiously deals very little with his books. (It is definitely not a critical biography.)

One becomes overwhelmed with the minutae, though bits and pieces of them can be interesting: Melville felt that REDBURN was "trash," and he wrote it "to buy tobacco with." He feared being known merely as the author of TYPEE (his most popular book with the public by far), a somewhat scandalous book at the time. Melville also learned on his whaling voyage to the Pacific that sailors appreciated literature, and read or were read to often aboard ship.

Parker has certainly written a fact-filled book, but he doesn't go beyond recording the facts. Disappointing.

Unless you are a determined and anxiety-ridden Ph. D. candidate studying for an oral exam, avoid this tedious display of pedantry. There are no insights into Melville's life or works here, only the stuff footnotes are made of. I guarantee this book as a cure for insomnia.