Hershel Parker's Interview in THE BIOGRAPHER'S CRAFT (December 2014)

Parker was a 1997 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851, the first of a two-volume work on the author. Member Interview Six Questions with Hershel Parker What’s your current project and what stage is it at? On the beach I brood daily about a short biography of Herman Melville told as a story into a speech recognition program. Meanwhile, I’ve devoted massive research to a sort of family biography in relation to episodes of American history, Ornery People: Who Were the Depression Okies? Which person would you like most to write about? Melville, although I can hardly hope to discover many documents as dazzling as those I used to telephone Hayford, Sealts, and Sendak about. And now, after Bezanson, the grand old Melvilleans are all gone! What’s your favorite biography? James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. In the translation Melville used, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. My aesthetic: More is more. One research/marketing/attitudinal tip that failed? Maurice Sendak’s new cover pictures would boost sales, we thought. No, the pictures were ignored, even the astonishing one for the second volume, Melville behind vines. What was your most frustrating time as a biographer? I had to break my contract with Norton after my first volume was finished. Whole days passed before Bill Regier drove up from Johns Hopkins with cash to repay Norton’s advances and leave change left over for picture permissions. Whew! Most satisfying? Early in 2013 in TBC Carl Rollyson said that in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative I was concerned “with much more than Melville.” I was “really writing a fascinating study of biography as a genre.” The 2014 Year’s Work in English Studies says that Melville Biography “is a book about biography as a genre. Whilst it is not a manual for the budding biographer, this collection of insights, which explores the difficulties of taking on such an enormous, theoretically fraught task, will serve as a useful case study to anyone wishing to engage themselves as a chronicler of literary lives.” My extensive endnotes, I said, “discuss problems in Melville biography that other biographers and theorists have confronted in their work,” so that “a reader can think critically about issues while being lured on to thoughtful works by writers such as Paula R. Backscheider, Robert D. Hume, Paul Murray Kendall, Ray Monk, Stephen B. Oates, and Barbara W. Tuchman, as well as being lured back into further reflection on my own expositions on Melville biography and historiography.” Too few biographers, I said, “have had their dicta applied, tested, and sometimes challenged by later biographers,” but Melville Biography “puts forward ideas of many biographers and theorists of biography and all sorts of life-writing in order to test them against what I have learned in working on Melville and writing my biography as well as what I have learned about autobiography and biography in writing this book.” Writing the biography was satisfying, but it is also immensely satisfying to contribute, as Year’s Work said, “to the relatively new field of biography studies.” We are in this together.