Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 1, 1819-1851)

Book was for my personal library

The details of an important man's life are all there. You will know the man, writer and time of his life.

supoerb,comprehensive bio written in a lucid novelistic style that never lags and keeps the readers interest till the end.a must for aficionados of melville and the american renaissance..i highly recommend this monumental biography

Amazing. So much information on Melville. Loved this. Not thrilled with cover portrait of Melville.

This, the first volume of the most comprehensive of all the biographies of Herman Melville, is written for anyone wanting to know anything and everything about the renowned author's life (rather than his writings). Its detail is exhaustive - in more ways than one. Therefore it is not an especially enjoyable book for the casual reader but serves as an excellent resource for researchers.A more enjoyable read, although it is still long, is Laurie Robertson-Lorant's "Melville, A Biography."Still, Parker's work is an amazing feat of scholarship and should be in the library of any serious student, or fan, of Herman Melville. - Lynn Michelsohn, co-author of "In the Galapagos Islands with Herman Melville"

A very long and detailed Melville biography. I appreciated the fact that it didn't devote much space to interpretations of the body of Melville's work. There's an awful lot of interpretive criticism already out there, and we didn't need more in a biography. If you're already a Melville fanatic and are really interested in whether Melville actually worked briefly at a bowling alley in Hawaii as a pin setter (the novel that he never wrote) or how he travelled on his honeymoon, you'll want to read this. If you haven't gotten much beyond one or two readings of Moby-Dick - that is if you haven't yet read Typee, Omoo, Whitejacket, Pierre, The Confidence Man - and still want to read the man's biography, I'd go for a more concise one than this. And the best news of all (for all Sub-Subs) is that Volume 2 is now available!

A huge biography, too huge for its own good. It covers the years from Melville's birth in 1819 up to the publication of MOBY DICK in 1851. Parker seems to have tracked down every move in Melville's life, but curiously deals very little with his books. (It is definitely not a critical biography.)One becomes overwhelmed with the minutae, though bits and pieces of them can be interesting: Melville felt that REDBURN was "trash," and he wrote it "to buy tobacco with." He feared being known merely as the author of TYPEE (his most popular book with the public by far), a somewhat scandalous book at the time. Melville also learned on his whaling voyage to the Pacific that sailors appreciated literature, and read or were read to often aboard ship.Parker has certainly written a fact-filled book, but he doesn't go beyond recording the facts. Disappointing.