| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Herman Melville: A Biography.Vol. 2: 1851–1891. By Hershel Parker. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xx, 997 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-6892-0.)

In this concluding section of his massive two-volume Melville biography, Hershel Parker traces the novelist's life from its creative acme, in the early 1850s, to his death four decades later. The career arc Parker describes is familiar enough. Melville's masterpieces, particularly Moby-Dick (1851), were widely attacked by reviewers and misunderstood by his family; as a result, Melville groped for a suitable artistic medium, committing himself mainly to poetry after his major fiction was undervalued. He braved fits of melancholy until he began to get some positive responses shortly before his death.

Although this overall life pattern is well known, many of the facts Parker provides are not. The great merit of this biography is that its exhaustive research yields a wealth of fresh information about Melville's life.

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