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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.
- Sales Rank: #811912 in Books
- Published on: 2006-09-12
- Released on: 2006-09-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.12" l, .90 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 446 pages
From Publishers Weekly
As Melville said of Bartleby the Scrivener, "no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man." So, notes Columbia humanities professor Delbanco (The Death of Satan), a similarly incomplete record exists for Melville. Nevertheless, in this accessible account, Delbanco both places the great novelist assuredly in his time and delves into his works' continuing significance. While Melville's career at sea initially defined his literary reputation, Delbanco also notes that an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to go west and his later return to New York City were essential to Melville's sense of the fresh, and fragile, American republic. Delbanco also traces a Romantic thread in Melville's work (he had a fascination with Frankenstein) and the impact of abolitionism, drawing a parallel between the fugitive slave cases judged by Melville's father-in-law and his portrayal of the Pequod's African-American cabin boy, Pip. Melville's gradual withdrawal from public life after Moby-Dick's failed reception added to the dearth of biographic data, but Delbanco saves most of his theorizing for Melville's work—expansively open as it is to Freudian, environmental, postcolonial and endless other interpretations. Even now, Delbanco observes, Melville's uniquely American myth of Ahab and the white whale has been recognized in President Bush's pursuit of Osama bin Laden. 57 b&w illus. (Sept. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Delbanco, a professor of American studies at Columbia, attempts to place Herman Melville and his work in the context of his time-no easy task, since Melville, after the early success of his South Seas adventures "Typee" and "Omoo," was regarded by most of his contemporaries as a freakish failure. "Moby-Dick" was widely panned, and a review of his next novel, "Pierre," was headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY." His own publishers suspected that he was going mad, and "Billy Budd" remained unpublished for thirty-three years after his death. Delbanco writes about Melville with a sympathy and passion that illuminate both his sad life and the more obscure corners of his writings. "Benito Cereno" gives perspective on the war on terror; and the much maligned "Pierre" is a "preview of the camp sensibility." Melville's very "dissonance in his own time," Delbanco writes, makes him seem at home in ours.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
From Bookmarks Magazine
There’s little new to say about an author as studied and lionized as Herman Melville. What notes he left have been scoured clean for insight into his thoughts on subjects from sexuality to slavery. Delbanco, Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and author of The Death of Satan, takes on the role of the great collator. With an eye toward creating a biography for the general reader, he borrows liberally from the work of others, tying the whole together with his own readings and literary style. Though "definitive" rings hollow in the halls of Melville scholarship, the polish and comprehension of Delbanco’s work will guarantee a satisfied readership.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
53 of 56 people found the following review helpful.
A New Study of Herman Melville
By Robin Friedman
Herman Melville (1819 -- 1893) is one of the writers I have returned to again and again over the course of years. Thus, I was gratified to receive this new book by Andrew Delbanco, "Melville: His Life and Work" (2005) as a gift and to have the opportunity to read it, think again about Melville, and share my thoughts on this site with other readers. Delbanco is Levi Professor in the Humanities and Director of American Studies at Columbia University. He has published widely on American literature, including a book titled "Required Reading: why our American Classics matter now." Before reading Professor Delbanco's Melville study, I also read the lengthy review by Frederick Crews in the December 1, 2005, "New York Review" which is both laudatory and critical.
The literature on Melville continues to grow, and in recent years biographies have been published that are longer and far more detailed than Professor Delbanco's. But Delbanco's study is accessible, engagingly written, and concentrates, as the subtitle to his book implies, in placing Melville in the historical context of Nineteenth Century America, and on the works themselves. I will discuss each of these factors briefly.
As to Nineteenth Century America, Professor Delbanco discusses Melville's roots as the descendant, on both sides of his family, of heroes of the Revolutionary War. He gives a revealing picture of pre-Bellum America and of the seafaring life. He gives a detailed historical discussion, for a literary biography, of the tumults which split the United States and lead to the Civil War, including the War with Mexico, the compromises of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Professor Delbanco shows how Melville responded to both the literary and political events of his time. He also gives a good, if briefer, treatment of the Civil War and of Melville's life thereafter, as the United States expanded and a crude materialism became dominant. But most vividly, Professor Delbanco gives a picture of New York City, both before and after the Civil War, and argues convincingly for the strong formative influence that the city exerted on Melville's writings.
As to Melville's writings, Professor Delbanco devotes a great deal of space to Melville's four widely-recognized masterpieces: Moby Dick, Bartelby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd. He offers textual exposition, compositional background, and a good literary sense of the complexities and ambiguities in each of these works. He offers shorter yet rewarding discussions of several of Melville's more controversial efforts, including Pierre, The Confidence Man, his collection of Civil War Poetry called Battle Pieces, and the long poem Clarel. I think that Delbanco undervalues some of the poetry, particularly Battle Pieces which I have found over the years a provocative literary guide to the Civil War.
The treatment of Melville's life is interrelated well with a study of his works, as Professor Delbanco gives succint discussions of Melville's early years, his decision to go to sea, his marriage, the question of his sexual orientation, the friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, his travels and wanderings, the tragic deaths of two of his sons, and the long reclusive years Melville spent as a customs inspector in New York City. We see Melville with all his difficulties and as a great but in his lifetime forgotten writer. Readers interested in a good novelistic portrayal of Melville may wish to read Frederick Busch's "The Night Inspector", to which Professor Delbanco refers.
(...)
I came away from Professor Belbanco's book with the desire to revist some of the Melville works that I have read in the past and, perhaps, to read some of the works that I don't know for the first time. I think it is the purpose of a study such as Delbanco's to return to reader to the words of the author, in this case Melville. Delbanco's book succeeds in doing so admirably.
(...)
34 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
Brevity is Wit
By Paul Mallory
Andrew Delbanco has given us an accessible and meaningful account of the writing, life, and world of Herman Melville. This is by no means an exhaustive biography, but Delbanco successfully gives us a good background on his life and times. He weaves literary interpretation, biography, and history into one poetic yarn. He draws on a lot of sources, including letters to or from Melville, but these sources are by no means a crutch to lean on. It was a very enjoyable read, and would be worthwhile to a literary scholar or to educated laypersons, regardless of having previously read a Melville biography or not. It is recommended that one have at least a cursory knowledge of American literature before diving into this word-storm, and I say that approvingly.
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
Very heavy carpentry throughout.
By Irving Warner
Though this book received several awards for biography, and mentioned as "first rate biography' by the New York Times I can't agree. I indeed purchased Mr. Delbanco's 2006 work looking forward to reading a first rate biography on this great writer.
Instead, what I got was a long tome with complex and highly subjective psychoanalytical criticism about the Melville canon. I read little about his life, somewhat more about his times and world, and by far more about Mr. Delbanco's parsing the root behavioral causality of Melville's creations.
It was, indeed, aptly pointed out by Mr. Delbanco that Melville left a light biographical record; hence, it is difficult for the scholar to research his life at depth. Actually, a book that is by-in-large just biography would be much shorter than this work's 325 pages of text.
So there are gaps that raise constructive temptations for the scholar. As one of my graduate professors once said about a project paper, "I see some very heavy carpentry going on in this work."
And throughout Delbanco's book, there is, in my view, some heavy carpentry that is conspicuously top heavy. He does this often in Melville. Worse yet, he seemed to be primarily of the Freudian persuasion, and once that takes hold of a critic's soul, it can get very wild. There are few sexual spins that Mr. Delbanco's avoids. On the contrary, each of Melville's works is thoroughly soaked in this dubious vat.
In presenting the historical and sociological context, Mr. Delbanco's does good work, but it could have been better. Since Melville's foundational works were so tied to the South Seas and Polynesia, I thought he might have shown a more accurate historical light on it, but he did not.
By the time Melville came upon the scene , contact was nearly a century old. Depopulation was more than halfway there. The expatriate Polynesians that populated the pages of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast were an accurate account of the time, and Dana's travels preceded Melville's.
The Marquesas, one of the root sources for Hawaii's Polynesian people, preceded Hawaii regards the travails of contact. Fact is, Typee was and remains entirely a work of fiction by a young, ambitious writer bent on writing a successful work, and he succeeded. Nothing wrong with that--and as a writer of fiction, I can relate to it absolutely.
All the spins and conjectures regards Melville's romping with Polynesian beauties with white, flashing teeth made good fiction but bad scholarship. To see a scholarly spin off on these popular myths regards serious textual issues - well, that is not impressive. By 1800, there weren't many white, gleaming teeth in Polynesia, nor, sadly, clear skins.
It was far more interesting--if you did have to get serious about psychological elements regards Melville--why he would write positively--even reinforcingly-- about carefree sexual license. Then, after returning home, he married into such a hidebound, uptight New England tradition. As Mr. Delbanco pointed out, in this culture even anatomical structures (e.g. legs, waists, etc.) weren't considered mentionable in mixed company.
One cannot feature Mr. and Mrs. New Englander chasing each other around from window seat to window seat during major sexual frolicking. For one thing was absolutely true about Polynesian culture, it was vigorous and sensual, regardless of health issues.
So, if you get this book understand what lies ahead of you. Herman Melville was a creative power of such wide scope and magnitude, that Mr. Delbanco's efforts fall way short of doing him justice.
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