The death of Joyce Deveau Kennedy last Friday is high in my mind as I look at passages in my first copy of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE. What I focus on are the passages about the joy of discovery which a researcher in the archives experiences--and not just the archives in libraries. Scott Norsworthy and I and a few others have made dazzling discoveries about Melville from databases on the Internet. The biographer who writes his or her book from other books can never experience the joy of sudden revelation after arduous effort, as Joyce did.
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