Volume 52, Number 19 · December 1, 2005
Melville the Great
By Frederick C. Crews
Melville: His World and Work
by Andrew Delbanco
Knopf, 415 pp., $30.00
It ought to be relatively easy by now to get a clear general view of Herman Melville, whose reputation has long been unsurpassed among American writers. Although he left relatively few documentary traces and went unnoticed through the last three quarters of a literary career that began in the 1840s and extended all the way to his death in 1891, herculean scholarly efforts by Harrison Hayford, Jay Leyda, Henry A. Murray, Hershel Parker, and others have unearthed more than enough facts to establish how his social station plummeted when, at age eleven, he endured his father's business failure and sudden death; how his sea voyages and his omnivorous reading vastly broadened his outlook; how, after much effort in subsequent novels, tales, and sketches, he gave up trying to retain the admiration of readers who had welcomed such early adventure novels as Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850); and how he eventually became a reclusive poet, an ill-paid customs inspector, and an unhappy husband and father whose domestic life was punctuated by horrors—the suicide of one son and the early death of another—that reinforced his already pronounced susceptibility to depression.
Review, 4607 words
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