{"product_id":"melville-isbn-9780375702976","title":"Melville","description":"If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eMelville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of \u003ci\u003eTypee\u003c\/i\u003e to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond\u003ci\u003e Moby Dick\u003c\/i\u003e, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.“Masterful. . . Delbanco is a fine historian as well as a fine critic”–\u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An eclectic, humane, historically grounded tribute to Melville’s best achievements and a moving account of the troubles that closed in on him. . . . Among recent lives of Melville, this one has no peer for grace of style, vividness of historical evocation, and sympathy for a subject whose flaws and prejudices are nevertheless kept in view.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In Andrew Delbanco, Melville has found the perfect combination of biographer and critic [skilled] at re-creating the circumstances — the historical moment, the physical setting, the emotional state, the spiritual frenzy, that attended Melville's art.” –\u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Andrew Delbanco places the enigmatic Herman Melville in a light that is remarkably sustained and often brilliant. His acute sense of the man, his wide-angled literary insight, and the range and strength of his grasp of Melville's world enable Delbanco to deliver full-scale the strangest of our literary giants. He also has placed himself in the company of Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin and Richard Chase as a trustee of our literature who writes as well as he reads.\" -Ted Solotaroff“\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDelbanco’s \u003ci\u003eMelville\u003c\/i\u003e is a reward, a brilliant and nourishing narrative that reaches beyond literary biography to an exuberant cultural history. His voice is strong–at times personal in his fresh reading of Melville’s life and work.” –Maureen HowardAndrew Delbanco is the author of \u003cb\u003eThe Death of Satan\u003c\/b\u003e (1995), \u003cb\u003eRequired Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now\u003c\/b\u003e (1997), and \u003cb\u003eThe Real American Dream\u003c\/b\u003e (1999), all of which were NYTBR notable books. \u003cb\u003eThe Puritan Ordeal \u003c\/b\u003e(1989) won the Lionel Trilling Award from Columbia University. He has edited \u003cb\u003eWriting New England\u003c\/b\u003e (2001), \u003cb\u003eThe Portable Abraham Lincoln\u003c\/b\u003e (1992), volume two of \u003cb\u003eThe Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson\u003c\/b\u003e (with Teresa Toulouse), and, with Alan Heimert, \u003cb\u003eThe Puritans in America\u003c\/b\u003e (1985). His essays appear regularly in\u003ci\u003e The New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eGranta\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePartisan Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eRaritan\u003c\/i\u003e, and other journals. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 2001 he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2003 named New York State Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities. He is a trustee of the National Humanities Center and the Library of America, and has served as Vice President of PEN American Center. Since 1995 he has held the Julian Clarence Levi Professor Chair in the Humanities at Columbia University.\u003cb\u003eCHILDHOOD AND YOUTH\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    1.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He was born on August 1, 1819, into good circumstances. But his parents   lacked the money to stay there, and so they turned, at no small cost to   their dignity, to their elders for help. On his mother’s side, the   benefactor was Maria’s father, Peter Gansevoort, a towering man (six   foot three in an age when six-footers were rare) famous for having   commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix, an outpost guarding the trade   route from the Great Lakes, during the British siege of 1777. There is   a tendency today to think of the Revolutionary War as a dispute among   bewigged gentlemen who sent men into battle with inaccurate guns to the   martial music of fife and drum; in fact, it was a brutal war whose   combatants literally tasted sweat and blood flung from the bodies of   their enemies as they slashed at each other with bayonets. It was not   uncommon for wounded soldiers to be stabbed through and left to bleed   to death “like sieves,” or to have their brains dashed out with   “barbarity to the utmost” by the musket butts of the advancing enemy.   Melville was to write about this war in the novel Israel Potter, in   which he described the Yankee defenders at Bunker Hill gripping their   muskets by the barrel and beating back the British assault by “wielding   the stock right and left, as seal-hunters on the beach, knock down with   their clubs the Shetland seal.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Melville’s Gansevoort grandfather was known for his valor in the face   of superior numbers of enemy troops. At Fort Stanwix, having refused to   receive a verbal message from the officer in charge of the British   assault, he was presented with a written ultimatum to surrender   “exhibiting in magnificent terms . . . the strength of the [British]   army . . . and the hopeless situation of the garrison,” to which he   replied with formal contempt:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sir:—In answer to your letter of today’s date, I have only to say, that   it is my determined resolution, with the forces under my command to   defend this fort, at every hazard, to the last extremity, in behalf of   the United American States, who have placed me here to defend it   against all their enemies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I have the honor to be, Sir,  Your most obedient and humble servant,  Peter Gansevoort, Col.,  Commanding Fort Stanwix\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This immovable eighteenth-century gentleman lived out his years in   Albany. Upon his death in 1812, seven years before his grandson Herman   was born, Peter Gansevoort’s assets were passed on to his son Peter   Junior, along with the obligation to look after his sister Maria and   her unborn children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the Melville side, too, there was a modest fortune, and Herman’s   father, Allan, did his best to tap it. Allan’s father, Major Thomas   Melvill, was also a celebrated veteran of the Revolution, accustomed to   being greeted on the streets of Boston with bows of deference.* In   1831, when the deference was turning to pity, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes   made a little verse sketch of him called “The Last Leaf”:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My grandmamma has said—  Poor old lady; she is dead  Long ago—  That he had a Roman nose,  And his cheek was like a rose  In the snow\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But now his nose is thin,  And it rests upon his chin  Like a staff,  And a crook in his back,  And a melancholy crack  In his laugh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One basic fact linked the lives of Melville’s grandfathers: both had   been born English and had become, by violence, American. On childhood   visits to Boston, Herman heard war stories directly from Thomas   Melvill, who still wore his “old three-cornered hat, \/ And the   breeches, and all that,” and proudly showed his grandson the vial   containing tea leaves brushed from his clothes after he had taken part   in the Boston Tea Party dressed in Indian garb and warpaint. Though he   never knew his maternal grandfather, Herman learned about “the hero of   Fort Stanwix” from his mother and uncles, and doubtless had him in mind   for the portrait, in Pierre, of “grand old Pierre Glendinning”—a   massive man who, “during a fire in the old manorial mansion, with one   dash of his foot . . . had smitten down an oaken door,” and “in the   wilderness before the Revolutionary War . . . had annihilated two   Indian savages by making reciprocal bludgeons of their heads.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    If Melville’s grandfathers were holdovers from the glorious past, his   father lived in a fanciful future. Born in Boston, Allan Melvill wooed   his bride from a venerable Dutch patroon family in Albany, then moved   to the fast-growing city of New York. Having made the Grand Tour of   Europe as a young man, he became an import merchant specializing in   what today we would call accessories—a “deluxe Mr. Micawber,” as James   Wood has aptly called him—with the groundless optimism of someone   proficient at deceiving himself. He was always counting on this or that   “confidential Connexion” to deliver a windfall, or assuring his   creditors that some long-pending deal was about to close. “My prospects   brighten,” he wrote in 1820 to his own father when Herman was not yet a   year old, “\u0026amp; without being over sanguine, I may be allowed to indulge,   under the blessing of Heaven, anticipations of eventual success.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Allan was being over-sanguine, and everyone knew it—though for a time   his bravado almost convinced the world that his failures were temporary   and his successes deferred. By all accounts, he had an eye for quality.   An advertisement he placed in 1824 in a New York newspaper gives an   idea of his inventory: “Fancy Hdfks. and Scarfs . . . Elastic and Silk   Garters, Artificial Flowers, Cravat Stiffners, \u0026amp;c. Also in store . . .   rich satin striped and figured blk Silk Vestings, Gros de Naples Hdkfs,   Belt and Watch Ribbons, 7–16 \u0026amp; 7–22 Silk Hose . . . Horse Skin Gloves .   . . Cologne and Lavender Waters, \u0026amp;c.” He could switch easily into the   visitor’s native language when a Frenchman entered his store, and he   furnished his home with mementoes of his European travels, whose   provenance he loved to detail for friends over a glass—or two—of old   cognac.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But the yield from his talents was meager. Year by year, Allan turned   his life into an almost sordid tale of reckless borrowing and groveling   appeals for cash to carry him through to the next promised bonanza. He   never became at ease in the increasingly impersonal system whereby   European exports were sold in bulk to American auction houses, from   which they were bought by wholesalers and distributed to the retail   trade—a business in which good taste and personal charm counted for   less than the ability to anticipate rising markets by buying low and   falling prices by selling high. Following the trade agreements with   Britain that settled the War of 1812, something like the frantic rhythm   of modern commodities markets developed, and Allan Melvill was   unprepared. Nearly forty years later, aspects of Allan turn up in his   son’s portrait, in White-Jacket, of an effete Commodore’s secretary who   looks like an “ambassador extraordinary from Versailles,” and whose   prized possessions include “enamelled pencil-cases” and “fine French   boots with soles no thicker than a sheet of scented notepaper.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    If Melville’s father was always off on some flighty new venture, his   mother was a woman of gravity. Daughter of a respected family with   roots in the quasi-feudal aristocracy of the Hudson Valley, Maria   Gansevoort had grown up speaking Dutch with her parents, who provided   her with the years of music and dancing lessons essential to a young   lady of breeding who was expected to make herself gracious and   decorative. But she was trained as well in the severe Protestantism of   her ancestors, and remained wary all her life of placing too much faith   in the things of this world lest they be snatched away. Especially in   the months after giving birth, which she did eight times, she was given   to moodiness, and though she wanted her own children to master such   worldly arts as penmanship and deportment, she was at pains to prepare   their souls for deprivation and death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was from Maria that Herman received the rudiments of a religious   education. Although she chastised him well into adulthood for his   spotty church attendance, and he was never what we would call   “observant,” the ultimate questions posed by religion never lost their   hold on his imagination. Maria, who knew the Bible in Dutch as well as   English, brought biblical stories, exempla, and precedents into the   lives of all her children, and for her second son characters from the   Bible always remained as vividly alive as the worthies and villains of   his own time. Ishmael, Bildad, Ahab, and Elijah are just a few of the   names in Moby-Dick by which he invests characters with a priori   allegorical significance before they begin to act in his invented   world. He ends his great story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” with a   quotation from the Book of Job (Bartleby sleeps “with kings and   counselors”); and in his final work, Billy Budd, he gives the music of   the Bible in a telling variation to Captain Vere, who quotes Acts   17:28, reminding his officers that the “element in which we move and   have our being” is not God, but the sea. The pioneer scholar Nathalia   Wright counts 250 biblical allusions in Moby-Dick alone. Melville knew   the Bible so well, she writes, that “he could smell the burning of   Gomorrah, and the pit; hear the trumpet in the Valley of Jehoshaphat   and . . . taste Belshazzar’s feast.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the early years when he heard travelers’ tales from his father and   Bible stories from his mother, Herman was too young to understand the   toxic mixture of gratitude and resentment that both his parents felt   because of their continued dependence on their own parents. But the   anxieties of childhood stayed with him. “Ah, fathers and mothers!,” he   wrote in the self-mocking style of Pierre, “. . . give heed! Thy little   one may not now comprehend the meaning of those words and those signs,   by which, in its innocent presence, thou thinkest to disguise the   sinister thing ye would hint. Not now he knows; not very much even of   the externals he consciously remarks; but if, in after-life, Fate puts   the chemic key of the cipher into his hands; then how swiftly and how   wonderfully, he reads all the obscurest and most obliterate   inscriptions he finds in his memory. . . .” When childhood memories do   turn up in Melville’s writing, they tend to be “shadowy reminiscences,”   such as his allusion in Moby-Dick to the workmen he saw on visits to   Boston, pushing wheelbarrows of dirt down Beacon Hill for the landfill   that would become Back Bay. Tensions in his parents’ home in New York   and summer visits to his Boston grandfather left impressions that   became, over time, fragmentary memories tinged with sadness—as when he   recalls, in Redburn, the melancholy longing provoked by the miniature   glass ship displayed in his grandfather’s curio case, or when, in   Pierre, he draws a portrait of a smothering mother whose compulsive   demands on her son are a form of displaced rage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Among the strains between his parents were their religious differences.   Although Allan habitually spelled the word GOD with capital letters, he   adopted his own father’s mild Unitarianism, which, according to more   pious members of the family, including his wife, tended to diminish the   majesty of God in favor of the dignity of man. Maria not only took her   churchgoing more seriously but was warmly committed to the Calvinist   creed to which her family had subscribed in its Dutch Reformed version.   After Herman was born, she managed to persuade her pastor, the Reverend   J. M. Mathews, to make an exception to the church rule against home   baptism. When Mathews came to the Melvill house on Pearl Street in   August 1819 to baptize the new baby, he asked both parents to   acknowledge the hard truth that “children are . . . born in sin, and   therefore are subject to all miseries, yea to condemnation itself,” and   to promise that they would instruct their child “to the utmost of your   power” in the shame of its sinfulness. Allan made sure that these   affirmations were followed by a reception featuring a strong rum punch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One thing at which Allan Melvill was adept was living beyond his means,   and so his children grew accustomed to comfort and even to a touch of   opulence. The family always employed several servants—housekeeper,   cook, nurse, and waiter—and Allan did not cut back on expenses as he   descended into debt. On the contrary, he increased them by moving from   address to address, each an improvement in space and prestige on its   predecessor—from No. 6 Pearl Street, just a few steps from the   waterfront, a year later to larger quarters on Courtlandt Street (on   the future site of the World Trade Center), to a still grander house on   Bleecker Street, and finally, in 1828, to Broadway, between Bond and   Great Jones streets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Tracing the Melvills’ movements northward in Manhattan reveals a family   trying to disguise the fact that its fortunes were declining. Their   migration away from the noise and smell of the waterfront exemplified   their plight: even as Allan moved up in the world of appearances, he   was losing touch with the source of his livelihood. “In this republican   country,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote years later, “amid the   fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the   drowning-point”—and Allan Melvill was one of the drowning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    2.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    How well he hid this truth from his second son is impossible to know.   But we do know that on a stormy October night in 1830, his business in   ruins, and owing several months of back rent on his house, Allan   Melvill, accompanied by eleven-year-old Herman, fled New York City via   steamboat for Albany, where his wife and the rest of the children had   preceded him. Two months later, he presented the undignified spectacle   of a middle-aged man and father of eight begging his own father for   help: “I am destitute of resources and without a shilling,” he wrote to   the old Major on December 4, and “may soon be prosecuted for my last   quarters rent . . . without immediate assistance I know not what will   become of me. . . .” He had become, in effect, the ward of his   brother-in-law, Peter, the Gansevoort son and heir, who generously   agreed to cover his “daily expences” with loans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was the end of Allan Melvill’s hopes and of his son’s boyhood. “I   had learned to think much and bitterly before my time,” Herman was to   write nearly twenty years later in the voice of the fictional narrator   in Redburn. “I must not think of those delightful days, before my   father became a bankrupt . . . and we removed from the city; for when I   think of those days, something rises up in my throat and almost   strangles me.” The memory of cowering with his beaten father in that   ship as it pitched and rolled at anchor while the storm blew through   New York left its trace in Moby-Dick when, speaking through the voice   of Father Mapple, Melville writes of Jonah “lying in his berth” while   his mind “turns and turns in giddy anguish.”","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300770468069,"sku":"NP9780375702976","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375702976.jpg?v=1767732536","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/melville-isbn-9780375702976","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}