Herman melville biography two volume set
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Herman Melville : a biography
2 volumes : 24 cm
Traces Melville's life from his childhood in New York, through his adventures abroad as a sailor, to his creation of "Moby-Dick," and forty years later, to his death, in obscurity
Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Association of American Publishers PROSE Award (volume 2), 2002
Association of American Publishers PROSE Award (volume 1), 1996
Committed to retain 2018
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Reviews (1)Subject:Volume 2 only.
The description in the entry is misleading.
It presents information about the two volume as if both volumes are here.
This is Volume 2 only of the 2 Volume ... Biography.
Volume 1 1819-1851 needs to be added when donated.
There is 1 review for this item. .
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Herman Melville: A Biography
I'm experimenting. Reading Robin-Laurant's and Parker's biographies of Melville concurrently. I finished about a third of RL's bio, which brings Melville up to the publication of Mardi, which must be a most peculiar novel. Never mind. I've now read about 250 pages of Parker's biography, which derives entirely - or so he says - from the "Melville Log." I'm not entirely sure what that is, but my impression is that the log is a database of every document, printed source that pertains even remotely to the life and work of Herman Melville. Parker has devoted much of his career, it seems, to maintaining and enhancing this database, since he assumed responsibility from his predecessor. So my expectations of his biography weren't particularly high, let us say.
What I expected was a biographical narrative that reads like ingenting so much as a sequence of notecards knitted together bygd a very thin connective tissue of prose - tran
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Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 1, 1819-1851) - Hardcover
Synopsis
Having left most of Moby-Dick with a printer in 1851, Herman Melville lamented to Nathaniel Hawthorne that he would go down in history as a "man who lived among the cannibals!" Until his death in 1891, Melville was known as the author of Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847)―both semiautobiographical travel books, and literary sensations because of Melville's sensual description of the South Sea islanders. (A transatlantic furor raged over whether the books were fact or fiction.) His most famous character was Fayaway―not Captain Ahab, not the White Whale, not Bartleby, and definitely not Billy Budd, whose story remained unpublished until 1924.
Herman Melville, 1819-1851 is the first of a two-volume project constituting the fullest biography of Melville ever published. Hershel Parker, co-editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, reveals with extraordinary p