Herman Melville:
A Half Known Life
Originality seems a requirement for writing a biography, especially for a figure about whom several biographies already exist. Readers inevitably ask: Do we really need another one? Does it offer new information, new insights, a new approach? The legacy of Melville biography is humbling, so the challenge is also to offer an original voice, one that speaks to a new generation of scholars and general readers, avoids narrative arcs that bend the life beyond plausibility, breaks down the tired and standard assumptions of the life and works, and offers readers new ways of reading Melville. How is A Half Known Life different? Why does it deserve your attention?
Where some previous Melville biographies tend to skimp on the early life, shy away from literary interpretation, ignore the positive effect of Melville’s siblings and women on his growth as a writer, and over-psychologize or under-psychologize, my approach has been to show when and how Melville first experienced life events that initiated new strands in his evolving consciousness that would enable him to write his astonishing fictions and poems. Unlike other biographies, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life asks how Melville acquired his empathy for Blacks, women, and other men, how a coterie of sibling writers shaped his talent, how he orated and acted on stage, and how he transformed people into characters and trauma into symbol. I offer a “half known life” to underscore the biographer’s dilemma of rendering a creative life, which we cannot fully know, while reining in one’s subjectivities and remaining true to documentary facts.
The first two volumes of this three-volume critical biography, published by Wiley-Blackwell and culminating with the 1846 publication of Typee, offer new information about Melville’s creative processes and the replay of his life traumas in his writing; his father-longing and search for the roots of Being; his variant masculinities; the genesis of his liberalism and relevance today; his evolving empathy for women, African and Native Americans, Polynesians, and the dispossessed.
ARTICLES on the Art of Biography
“Melville and the Iroquois: Reading, Cosmopolitanism, and the Biographical Condition.” Special Issue on Biography. ER(R)GO: Theory, Literature, Culture. Forthcoming.
“Melville the Life: Accident, Coincidence, and Adjacency,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, 2nd edition, ed. Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, forthcoming 2021.
“The Biographical Re-Turn: Writing Melville Biography and the Example of Women,” in The New Melville Studies, Ed. Cody Marrs (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2018), 200-21.
To purchase (at a way-too-expensive price):
From Amazon
From the publisher
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Herman+Melville%3A+A+Half+Known+Life%2C+2+Volume+Set-p-9781405121903
Or ask your local bookstore to order it for you...
Sample Chapters
Readings
In the Works
