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Author Robertson-Lorant, Laurie, 1940-

Title Melville : a biography / Laurie Robertson-Lorant.

Publication Info. New York : Clarkson Potter/Publishers, [1996]
©1996

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Bristol, Main Library - Non Fiction  B MELVILLE, HERMAN    Check Shelf
 Mansfield, Main Library - Adult Biography  B MELVILLE    Check Shelf
 Marlborough, Richmond Memorial Library - Adult Department  B MELVILLE    Check Shelf
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  92 MELVILLE, HER    Check Shelf
 University of Saint Joseph: Pope Pius XII Library - Standard Shelving Location  818 M531XR    Check Shelf
Description xxv, 710 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [675]-683) and index.
Form Also issued online.
Summary Herman Melville's towering achievement stands as a timeless monument to the richness and diversity of nineteenth-century American literature. Employing a singularly American idiom, his immortal masterpiece, Moby-Dick, broke the bounds of the novel as it was then known and understood. But Melville's place in the pantheon of American literature is all the more exceptional given the fact that he remained virtually unknown as a writer throughout the course of his lifetime. It wasn't until the 1920s, some thirty years after his death, that he gained his reputation when that era's most influential literary critics promulgated his genius. Drawing upon more than five hundred newly discovered family letters, Laurie Robertson-Lorant now provides a richly fascinating and altogether fresh perspective on this titan of American literature.
With energetic prose, Robertson-Lorant immerses the reader in the political and social climate of the often turbulent world of Herman Melville, from his childhood to his adventurous seafaring days, to his intermittently successful but never fulfilling career as a writer. With breathtaking scope and an unerring eye for psychological nuance, Robertson-Lorant pinpoints the forces that would shape the man: the women and children in Melville's life, his complicated and enigmatic relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, the psychosexual tensions that informed his art, his struggles against debt, his disappointment about failing to win a popular audience for his more serious work, and the alcoholism and violence that plagued his family. Melville is a major, lively, brilliantly researched account of a true giant and one of America's greatest literary geniuses.
Contents Lofty origins -- Snug in investments -- Elegant negligence -- Tormented with an itch for things remote -- A naturally roving disposition -- The wild, the watery, the unshored -- The floodgates of the wonder-world -- A little experience in the art of book-craft -- Fierce cannibal delight -- Creating the creative -- The man who lived among the cannibals -- The prince of whales -- The ardent Virginian -- A sort of sea-feeling in the country -- One grand hooded phantom -- King of the cannibals -- Counter-friction to the machine -- Shadows foreshadowing deeper shadows -- What sort of bamboozling story is this? -- Childe Herman's pilgrimage -- A convulsed and half-dissolved society -- Fierce battles and civil strife -- A tie rich in catastrophes -- A survivor of the Civil War -- A time when peace had horrors of its own -- Agonies that operate unseen -- Devilish tantalization of the gods -- Confronting sphinx and angel -- The hellish Society of Men -- The rose farmer in the garden of truant Eve.
Subject Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.
Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography.
Other Form: Online version: Robertson-Lorant, Laurie, 1940- Melville. New York : Clarkson Potter/Publishers, c1996 (OCoLC)603799649
ISBN 0517593149
9780517593141
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