| Synopsis: |
This is the first volume of a two-volume project which provides a biography of Melville. The author reveals the ups, downs and impasses of Melville's life, from his patrician birth in New York to the publication of "Moby Dick, or The Whale" in 1851. Born to an aristocratic father with a taste for luxury but no instinct for his business as an importer of French dry goods, Melville grew up taking his patrician condition for granted. But when only 11 years old, he helped his father hustle the family furniture out of town to save it from seizure by creditors. The fragility of wealth and status, and the gap between appearance and truth had become all too clear. After the death of Melville's father in 1832, the widow and eight children experienced humiliating dependency. Herman's older brother became the man of the family, and Herman passed his boyhood in confining office work broken by stretches of worried idleness and fruitless job hunting until he went to sea - first, briefly, in 1839, then to the Pacific as a whaleman in 1841.When he returned home with a book to write, Herman, reenacting the familiar financial strains of his childhood, made a living from his writing no better than his father had done as a merchant. A scholar of Melville's life, works and milieu, Parker starts by pinpointing the facts of Melville's life. More important, he pulls those facts together, making sense of their manifold implications, and recreating the scenes, moods, attitudes and atmospheres through which Meville moved. |