http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/105843/the-last-critic-turns-100
Melville Biography: An
Inside Narrative is amazing, and
deliciously different from Hershel Parker’s string of non-retirement
works—intricately rooted in verifiable facts, precise and reliable as ever, but
juicier, braver, and better than anything he has done before now. This Inside
Narrative masterfully and entertainingly blends intellectual autobiography,
the untold and unexamined history of Melville scholarship, and instructive case
studies in the praxis of biography. Research hounds like me, thrilled by
Parker’s tales of the hunt, will delightedly follow him on the trail of
evidence and savor the joy of discovery. Academics across the disciplines will
be challenged by Parker’s insistent and cogently argued distinction between scholarship
and criticism. All readers who cherish truth-seeking and truth-saying will be
shocked then heartened by Parker’s exposés of bad scholarship, fake
scholarship, and the “mutual admiration society” of celebrity critics. As
intellectual autobiography Parker’s Inside Narrative is compelling and
revealing. In essence Parker demonstrates why his two-volume Melville biography
is matchless in scope, depth, accuracy, integrity, and humanity. As the
wonderfully intimate autobiography of the biographer and history of the
biography, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative powerfully reveals
what you need to acquire, and what you have to give up, to be maestro.--Scott
Norsworthy-- Bibliographical Associate on The
Writings of Herman Melville and author of “Melville’s Notes from Thomas
Roscoe’s The German Novelists.”
Hershel
Parker's Melville Biography: An Inside
Narrative is the cap-stone to the vital contributions he has made to the
stony field of Herman Melville scholarship. The book infuses humor, irony, and
scholarly insight to the art of understanding Melville and his entire body of
work, along with a sobering survey of Melville scholarship from the past 100
hundred years (both its groundbreaking accomplishments and its more corrosive
counterparts).This book stands as a stoic testament to a field of research
flamed solely by zeal and Spartan tenacity. Parker's process arrives to the
truth of the matter in a field littered with the rambling surmises of New
Critics hoping to eradicate authorial insight in favor of critical skewerings. Parker
not only stands for the tried and true ways of literary tradition, but also
embraces the potential of the Internet and blogging to enable the potential of
new information as well as finding new ways to reach an audience that continues
to expand generation after generation. Herman
Melville: An Inside Narrative has reshaped my own aesthetic and technique toward
literary biography as well as brought new appreciation for Hershel Parker and
that ungraspable phantom, the spirit of Herman Melville, that fuels the entire
scope of his scholarly cosmos.-- Paul Maher--Author of Kerouac: His Life and Work and Jack
Kerouac's American Journey: The Real-Life Odyssey of “On the Road.”
Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative takes us on an extraordinary journey through the life
and mind of Hershel Parker, the world's greatest Melville scholar. Parker
vividly retraces his decades as workaday Champollion when he dug through libraries
from New Orleans to Hampstead Heath, sacrificing his eyes on newspaper
microfilm and 19th-century handwriting as he sussed out the details
of the artistic development and financial struggles of Herman Melville. From
his harvest of hundreds of primary documents, Parker then wove their revelations
into his authoritative and compelling two-volume biography (1996 and 2002).Parker’s
life's work illustrates Beethoven's great maxim, that genius is the art of
taking pains. In Melville Biography Parker
frankly describes the uproar his serial revelations about Melville's life created
within the clubby little world of self-anointed and self-important Melville
critics, all strangers to the archives. This new book will enthrall not just
Melville fans, but all fans of great literature. It is must reading for anyone
who aspires to research a credible, fact-based biography. It is also must
reading for anyone who cares about creating great art, for in its tales of
triumph, conflict, and suppression at long last overcome, can be found all that
one puts at hazard in setting out on such an unfashionable voyage. In Melville Biography, Parker embodies the
title of another book on life-writing, Biography
as High Adventure.-- James Hime, Edgar finalist for The Night of the Dance, author of other Jeremiah Spur mysteries and
the Kindle Book, Three Thousand Bridges.
Imagine our gain if Richard Ellmann had reflected in a
book on his lives of Yeats, Wilde, and Joyce. Like Ellmann, Parker has devoted
his career to biography, and now in this Inside
Narrative offers his harvests of biographical research and thought. Never before has a literary biographer
reflected as deeply and frankly on the craft of life-writing and the fate of a
documentary biography as Parker does in this companion to his two-volume Herman
Melville: A Biography. Lovers of literary biography will rejoice at the
revelations of Parker’s arduous research, his stunning discoveries, his
dazzling handling of mundane evidence, and his hard-won theoretical
convictions. Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is part
autobiography and historiography of Melville biography; part exposé of the
follies of ahistorical writings on Melville by disciples of the New Criticism
and their archivophobic successors; and part a series of exemplary
demonstrations of a biographer at work, profiting from evolving online and
digital archival resources as well as his decades of traditional archival
research. Melville Biography leaves us knowing Herman Melville more
intimately than ever, points new researchers toward biographical riches on
Melville yet unexplored, offers practical guidance and heartfelt inspiration to
any life-writer, and enriches all lovers of literary biography. --Robert A. Sandberg
–Discoverer- transcriber of Melville’s
“House of the Tragic Poet” and design editor for The New Melville Log.
The TABLET efficiently and kindly erases errors and rewrites history! I am spelled right and am a survivor!
Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Starting in the postwar
years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its
association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new
students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there
was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and
scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at
Columbia, and Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the
biography of Henry James, and Hershel Parker wrote the biography of
Melville. Alfred Kazin recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.
Of that pioneering generation, one of the last survivors is M.H. Abrams, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on July 23. (Abrams is also still publishing: In August, Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) Abrams’ name will be familiar to just about every English major of the last half-century, if only because it appears at the top of the spine of each edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams created in 1962.
Of that pioneering generation, one of the last survivors is M.H. Abrams, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on July 23. (Abrams is also still publishing: In August, Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) Abrams’ name will be familiar to just about every English major of the last half-century, if only because it appears at the top of the spine of each edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams created in 1962.
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