Volume 44, Number 8 · May 15, 1997
The Great Leviathan
By Andrew Delbanco
Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819-1851
by Hershel Parker
Johns Hopkins University Press, 941 pp., $39.95
Son of one Revolutionary War hero and son-in-law of another, Allan Melvill had, as we would say today, good connections. Among the cousins of his wife, Maria, were the Van Rensselaers, and his own name was honored in the genteel circles of Boston and New York. But he failed miserably in his chosen business as an importer of fabrics and furs and spent his last decade begging his family for loans to ward off creditors unmoved by his pedigree. His health broken, he lived only a little more than twelve years past the birth, in 1819, of his second son, Herman. According to his brother-in-law, Peter Gansevoort, who attended his deathbed in the winter of 1832, he presented during his final illness 'the melancholly spectacle of a deranged man.'
Review, 6463 words
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