Correspondence. Vol. 14

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Melville, Herman, Author.

Contributor:

Horth, Lynn, Contributor.

Series:

Writings of Herman Melville ; vol. 14.

The writings of Herman Melville ; vol. 14

Standardized Title:

Correspondence

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Authors, American--19th century--Correspondence.

Melville, Herman, 1819-1891--Correspondence.

Novelists, American--19th century--Correspondence.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations.

Edition:

The Northwestern-Newberry edition.

Other Title:

Writings of Herman Melville

Place of Publication:

[Evanston] : Northwestern University Press, 2017.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"The Letters by and to Melville in this Correspondence volume span the greater part of his lifetime, extending from letters he wrote at the age of nine in 1828 to ones he sent and received during the year before his death at seventy-two in 1891." "The best of his own letters, some of them now anthology classics, are brilliantly revealing. These reflect the meteoric rise and excitement of his early literary career, from 1846 to 1851, as well as its equally precipitous subsequent fall; and the fullest and boldest of them, those to Evert A. Duyckinck, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and especially Nathaniel Hawthorne, were written at the pinnacle of that brief career. Yet Melville's letters through the years, even with their sporadic flashings-forth, were mostly occasional, businesslike, and never gossipy, expansive, or voluminous. The paucity of his actual as well as of his preserved correspondence contrasts surprisingly with the gregarious rush of to-and-fro epistolary traffic engaged in by his American literary contemporaries, to say nothing of the great English and Continental men and women of letters in his time." "Presented here is one sequence are the 313 texts, newly edited by Lynn Horth, that are known to survive of letters by Melville, and for the first time, in a separate sequence, the 88 texts that are known to survive of letters to him. Taken together, however, these surviving texts provide only a spotty chronicle of Melville's outer, and intermittent revelations of his inner, life. They provide so little not only because by all indications he wrote relatively few, and mostly sparse, letters but also because so many of those he did write, and receive, have been lost or destroyed. He himself, as he declared, habitually destroyed letters he received, including those he had prized from Hawthorne; and his daughter or some other too-proper descendant in the twentieth century lamentably destroyed his numerous letters to his wife.".

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on March 8, 2017).

ISBN:

0-19-184768-2

0-585-38292-1