MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

Finally, I more or less mastered Word endnotes and sent the thing off to the press. I opened the blackout curtains for the first time since May. They had been protecting my eyes from the glare as I stare into the computer screen. I have been telling myself I will never have to work this hard again, but someone reminds me that I said that after Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons came out in 1984.


Contents
Preface

§ I.--Biographer and Biography (with short headnote)
01 Melville and the Footsteps Theory of Biography
02 Textual Editor as Biographer in Training: The Norton Moby-Dick and the Northwestern-Newberry The Writings of Herman Melville
03 Entangled by Pierre: Doing Biography Away from the Archives
04 Creating The New Melville Log and Starting the Biography
05 Facts Which Do Not Speak for Themselves
06 Desiderata and Discoveries in Traditional Archives and Databases

§ II.—Critics vs. Biographical Scholarship (with short headnote)
07 Agenda-Driven Reviewers: Melville in the Insular New York Newspapers and Magazines vs. Global Loomings from “Ragtag Bloggers” and Litblogs
08 Little Jack Horners and Archivophobics
09 Biographical Scholars and Recidivist Critics
10 Presentism in Melville Biography
11 The Late 20th-Century Mini-Melville: New York Intellectuals without Information
12 The Early 21st-Century Mini-Melville: New York Intellectuals without Information

§ III.— Biographical Scholarship: Demonstrations and Challenges (with short headnote)
13 Melville as the “Modern Boccaccio”: The Fascinations of Fayaway
14 Melville’s Courtship of Elizabeth Shaw
15 Melville's Short Run of Good Luck (1845-1849): Fool’s Paradise without International Copyright
16 Melville without International Copyright (1850-1854): A Harper “Sacrifice” for the “Public Good”
17 Melville and Hawthorne’s Dinner at the Hotel in Lenox
18 Why Melville Took Hawthorne to the Holy Land: Biography Enhanced by Databases and an Amateur Blogger
19 Melville as a Titan of Literature among High-Minded English Admirers: The Kory-Kory and Queequeg Component
20 Damned by Dollars: Moby-Dick and the Price of Genius

The endnotes comprise a substantial fourth section. In them I quote three or four dozen collections or essays on biography or separate books on biography and a few dozen articles on biography from places like, well, the Hawaii periodical Biography,