The San Francisco Maritime Park presents a lecture and book signing by the master of Melville scholars, Hershel Parker. On the heels of the publication of his concluding volume of Herman Melville’s definitive biography, Hershel Parker will be speaking about the life and times of Herman Melville. Given to standing room only crowds on the East Coast, you won’t want to miss hearing this unique talk from the master of Melville scholars. Parker will also be signing copies of both volumes of the Melville biography and any of his other works. Parker’s Herman Melville Vol. 2 will be on sale at the Maritime Museum Building on Tuesday, October 22, 2002 at 7pm.
Lecture & Book Signing With Author Hershel Parker
The San Francisco Maritime Park presents a lecture and book signing by the master of Melville scholars, Hershel Parker. On the heels of the publication of his concluding volume of Herman Melville’s definitive biography, Hershel Parker will be speaking about the life and times of Herman Melville. Given to standing room only crowds on the East Coast, you won’t want to miss hearing this unique talk from the master of Melville scholars. Parker will also be signing copies of both volumes of the Melville biography and any of his other works. Parker’s Herman Melville Vol. 2 will be on sale at the Maritime Museum Building on Tuesday, October 22, 2002 at 7pm.
A finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, the first volume of Hershel Parker’s magnificent biography of Herman Melville revealed many new episodes in the writer’s early life and profoundly deepened what was already known about these years (1819-1851) of boundless ambition and exuberance. The eagerly awaited second volume redefines the last forty years of Melville’s life, from 1851 to 1891, a period scanted by all earlier biographers. The concluding volume of this magisterial project begins with the author awaiting reviews of Moby-Dick, a book he knew to be his masterpiece and felt sure would provide the financial security he needed to continue as a full-time writer. Shockingly, to both Melville and to posterity, the most influential reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic failed to recognize the novel’s originality and genius, and Melville would spend the rest of his life trying to recover from this blow.
Through prodigious archival research and with profound psychological sympathy and a novelist’s eye for brilliant detail, Parker creates an intense narrative of Melville’s life after Moby-Dick’s failure, detailing his setbacks and triumphs, his struggles and successes, the biographical and social context of his intellectual pursuits and the transformation of his world into his fiction. Working from almost 10,000 pages of documents, Parker dazzlingly delineates the later Herman Melville; ambitious advocate of literary friends’ dinner tables; laborer tortured by secret debts; exquisitely suffering Stoic; companionable recluse; loving domestic tyrant; and bargain-bin connoisseur.
That Hershel Parker’s biography of Melville will prove to be definitive is beyond question; that the concluding volume, like its predecessor, possesses both the same vividness, immediacy, and drama as a novel by Dickens or Balzac – along with the highest standard of historical scholarship – is an unparalleled marvel.
