Talk:Herman Melville
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[edit] Portrait
Why use the Barnes and Noble mural when there is this big high quality painted portrait: http://nantuckets.com/jpg/melville.jpg
- The Barnes & Noble mural has, as far as I know, never appeared on any Melville site, and provides a fresh image of a man of whom only 4 or 5 contemporary portraits exist. I say keep it. Dr. Trilobite 06:35, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Omoo and Typee
Omoo and Typee are not non-fiction; they are novels (although they are based on Melville's experiences). Typee is based on liveing with a canible tribe. Could someone please correct this section of the list of Melville's writings? If there are no objections, I will do it. Thanks. ffirehorse 01:43, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- Go for it. We like it when you correct mistakes - that's what Wikipedia is about! -Seth Mahoney 02:03, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
Just didn't want to step on anyone's work; it's not necessarily a minor edit. Thanks. ffirehorse 02:20, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Revisions?
Below is a revised text. I wanted to put the references to Hawthorne in a larger context -- I found the current text misleading to the extent that it may have implied that Melville was some sort of imitator or follower of Hawthorne's style of writing.
I have also added references to some additional works of Melville's.
My suggestions are not, I'm afraid, a model of elegant writing, but they are the best I can come up with for now. Any thoughts or comments?
Editorgeek 20:04, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, essayist, and poet. During his own lifetime his early novels, South Seas adventures, were quite popular, but his audience declined later in his life. By the time of his death he had nearly been forgotten. His masterpiece, Moby-Dick, originally published in 1851, was "rediscovered" in the 1920's. He is now widely esteemed as one of the most important figures in American literature.
Melville admired Nathaniel Hawthorne greatly, whose genius he compared to Shakespeare's in an essay entitled "Hawthorne and His Mosses,"[1] published in The Literary World in 1850. Melville and Hawthorne became close friends during the time Melville was working on Moby-Dick. He dedicated his great book to Hawthorne when it was published in 1851.
Beginning with his novel Mardi, and following with Moby Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man, Melville intended to craft serious literary works quite different from his earlier popular, South Sea adventures. These later novels brought mixed reviews and few sales to support his growing family. Melville briefly tried his hand at writing short works of fiction for magazines, but for the most part he had to rely on his father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw for money. Eventually, with Hawthorne's help, Melville received a political appointment as a New York City Customs agent in 1866, a post which he held for nineteen years. By that time, however, he was suffering serious bouts of depression, no doubt magnified by his frustrations with his literary career, his son's suicide, family tensions, and his anguish over the Civil War.
Melville published no more prose works after 1857 and began writing poetry during the Civl War. His last great work of fiction, the short novel Billy Budd, was an unpublished manuscript at the time of his death. It was later published successfully and turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten.
Melville's prose works include Typee, White-Jacket, Omoo, Mardi, Moby Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence Man and many short stories and works of various genres (including those published as The Encantadas and The Piazza Tales). His short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" is among his most important pieces, and has been considered a precursor to Existentialist and Absurdist literature. Melville is less well known as a poet and did not write any substantial poetry until late in his life; after the Civil War, he published Battle-Pieces, which sold well. But once again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's poetic masterpiece, the epic length verse-narrative Clarel, about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite unknown in his own time.
I think editing the mention of Billy Budd "sitting in a tin can for 30 years" is a good move. I have here a collection of short stories ("The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville," Horace Liveright, Inc., 1928) with an introduction by a man, Raymond Weaver, who claims to have rediscovered this manuscript, then in the possession of Melville's granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf. This introduction states that upon Melville's death his wife carefully collected many of the manuscripts (probably also destroying some in the process), and placed them in a "miniature trunk... where they reposed unhampered with for twenty eight years." The "tin can" version has a nice ring to it, but I am more inclined to believe the above version.
This introduction also discusses some of the problems inherent in publishing any "definitive" version of the Billy Budd story. Even though this was found in the above mentioned trunk, and in Melville's own handwriting, "the script is in certain parts a miracle of crabbedness: misspellings in the grand manner; scraps of paragraphs cut out and pasted over disembowelled sentences; words ambiguously begun and dwindling into waves and dashes," etc.
[edit] Scottish-American
I was never aware that Melville was of scottish descent, believing him to be English and Dutch in origin. Can anyone find a link on this?
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- I don't have a link, but Harrison Hayford's two-volume biography says that the MelVILLs (Herman's mother added the 'e' after her husband's death) were descended from Scottish nobility, whereas the mother's side of the family was, as you say, of Dutch descent.
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- I think you mean Hershel Parker's two-volume biography. I'm not aware of a Hayford 2-vol. bio. Also, I think it was Melville himself who added the "e," but it's been a while since I read that (and maybe I'm just trying to find another connection to Hawthorne (who added a "w" to his birth surname of "Hathorne"). Melvillean 17:50, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
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[edit] First-Person language
I can't believe that this (and the paraphrase notice) has remained in this article for over three years! This article desperately needs to be reworked. Tfine80 21:01, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Herman Melville's Religious Journey
Is the information which this book claims to provide about Melville accepted by scholars as true, or as a significant minority viewpoint? Does the book itself have notability? -- Antaeus Feldspar 17:49, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
I think it's fine to have this viewpoint in the article. It just needs to be supplemented with other perspectives on Melville's religious leanings. There has been a lot of research done on this topic and there are a lot of religious themes and allusions in his writings. Asedzie
- Well, having the viewpoint in the article is good; describing it as "one of the most important new insights about Herman Melville made in the last half of the 20th century" is not unless that actually is the importance that scholars place upon it. Since the editor who described it that way was talking about the research of his grandfather (and since he's shown certain problems with accurately understanding and representing what he reads) I don't think we can jump to the conclusion that it really is as important as is claimed. -- Antaeus Feldspar 00:28, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to point out that this section is a one-to-one copy of copyrighted material. See: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1571970533/ref=sib_rdr_ff/002-9931431-5698421?_encoding=UTF8&p=S002&j=0 Please delete. 80.171.66.56 21:33, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Battle Pieces
According to American National Biography and The Civil War World of Herman Melville, Melville fronted over four hundred dollars for publishing costs on Battle Pieces and hardly saw any return. Most critics claimed that it was too complicated as a work for the public audience
[edit] Vandals
Why is this page such a vandal magnet? I just blocked User:216.79.194.96 for 24 hours, but if this continues, we might want to consider semiprotection for a little while. -GTBacchus(talk) 18:57, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
- I watch a few writer and composer pages, Bacchus, and am surprised at how often they're vandalized too. Béla Bartók? What did he ever do to anyone? It seems to be just goofy teen-like behavior, so perhaps it's due to teenage vandals learning about these authors/composers in high school courses... If so, maybe it's a good-- if annoying-- sign that these high schoolers are familiar with names like Melville & Bartók... Keeps us on our toes anyway... Rizzleboffin 19:15, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Documenting sources and references
It seems to me that this article needs revisions, especially, I feel, it needs to document its sources. I think if that happened the quality of the article would improve significantly.
--Jottce 12:17, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] people will "vandalize" this site
your complaint only makes people want to do it more so stop your complaining and stop being so anal
[edit] daniel orme
In the article, I find no mention of "Daniel Orme", the very last Melville's fiction as they say. Any reason why? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 85.18.96.198 (talk) 10:19, 5 January 2007 (UTC).
[edit] Major bump-up
This article is pretty sound for a piece about a minor American novelist, but this is Herman Melville we're talking about. Is anybody up for doing a serious rethink of it, reflecting the fact that some people (C.L.R. James for example) consider Melville the greatest American author who's ever lived? He was Nabokov's favourite American novelist, too. I don't think that, as it stands, it conveys how much respect people have had for Melville. I'm not saying that the article has to puff him, obviously; just that it needs something like an Influence section or a Critical Response section . I'll have a go if nobody else will. (Also, Melville did not write Mardi as an account of his travels in Polynesia, or rather he may have started out writing it about them, but he soon began to do something very different.) Lexo 17:07, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Bisexuality
Herman Melville was bisexual and this is well known. This has been noted even by scholars: http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/ScholarsForum/MMD2461.html
- If you can find a source that is more than pure speculation, and cite it in the article, then the category can be added. Quadpus 21:09, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
- The Literary Dick (as in Private Detective) examines the question of Melville's sexuality (search for Melville on that page). Their conclusion is that Melville was bisexual, based on extended quotations from Laurie Robertson-Lorant's 1996 biography, Melville: A Biography (already cited in the article, though I have just corrected the copyright date). I don't have a copy of the actual book, but it does appear to be a mainstream, scholarly biography. If anybody has a copy, we can quote it directly and include an authoritative section on Melville's sexuality. Taranah 22:53, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
