Melville: A Biography

Drawing on more than five hundred newly discovered letters, this book immerses the reader in the often turbulent world of Herman Melville, from his childhood to his seafaring days, to his often frustrating career as a writer. With energetic prose and an unerring eye for psychological nuance, Laurie Robertson-Lorant explores the forces that shaped the man: the women and children in his life, his 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 an account of one of America's preeminent literary geniuses.

Herman Melville's goal as an author was to become one of the "thought-divers that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began." The source of this rather melodramatic approach to the art and craft of writing was a life that encompassed the whaling era and the Civil War and included time spent in Polynesia, where he was flogged, fled from cannibals, joined a mutiny, and frolicked with naked islanders. The result was a body of work that ranged from popular fiction (Typee) to the dreadful gothic romance (Pierre) to the classic Moby Dick. Working with 500 family letters found in 1983, Laurie Robertson-Lorant provides a compelling, multifaceted portrait of one of America's most intriguing literary figures.