Herman Melville: A Biography

If sheer bulk were enough to make a book definitive, respected Melville scholar Parker's encyclopedic but rather unwieldy biography would certainly be the one to beat. Covering Melville's life up to the completion (but not the actual publication) of Moby Dick, Parker presents an extensive look Melville's early years. His patrician family having been left destitute by an irresponsible father, the young Melville had to flee Manhattan with his family to avoid creditors. Naturally adventurous, and unable to finish his education due to lack of funds, Melville spent some five years at sea and abroad, experiences that yielded materials for nearly all of his writings. Parker does a very thorough job of delineating the realities of the literary marketplace of Melville's time, as well as Melville's public image as a licentious sexual outlaw for his portrayal of South Sea Islanders and the controversy over his unsympathetic portrayal of missionaries. He also explores the liberating influence of Hawthorne on Melville's sense of the possibilities for a national American literature. But Parker's thoroughness can be exhausting. In the absence of endnotes or footnotes, his text is stuffed with asides and trivial details that will be of interest only to the most dedicated of scholars. While Parker's literary insights are superior to those of Laurie Robertson-Lorant, whose biography of Melville was published in June of this year (Forecasts, March 25), Lorant's much more compact biography offers many of the same general insights on a vastly more accessible scale. (Dec.)