My goodness--a couple of 2018 reviews for MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, out January 2013.

It took more years than this for the 1984 FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS to get this sort of comment. The thing you have to do, I have found in the last weeks, is to stick around. If I had cashed in my meager chips after the final NN volume and the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of MOBY-DICK at the end of 2017, I would have missed the contract for the LOA volume, the Gallimard Quarto MOBY-DICK with my chronologie in it, the forthcoming JAR with a reprint (first "print") of "North Carolina Patriot Women Who Talked Back to the Tories," and the absolutely dumbfounding assignment of the Parker-Niemeyer 2nd Norton Critical Edition of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN to 2000 or 2500 of the brightest young Frenchmen and women (already with degrees like our Master's degree) as one of the five texts for the 2019 and 2020 aggregation exam. And Zeldock (below) is joined by another reader in a review of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY dated 2 April 2018. The lesson is if you have done good work over a long period the chances are that somewhere sometime someone is going to acknowledge it. It is the surviving till then that is the challenge.

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Zeldock
5.0 out of 5 stars
How the Sausage Gets Made
March 18, 2018
Format: Hardcover
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I assume anyone reading this knows that Hershel Parker is the world's greatest living authority on Herman Melville and the author of, among many other things, a magisterial two-volume biography of Melville (1996, 2002). In "Melville Biography," Prof. Parker offers what could be considered a giant "afterword" to that biography. At the risk of oversimplification, it is partly a memoir about his life's work as a scholar, partly a response to his critics, partly a critique of other Melville biographies, and partly a demonstration of how examination, re-examination, and well-informed analysis of primary sources can improve understanding of Melville's (or any writer's) life.

To the average reader, most of "Melville Biography" will seem like a lot of inside baseball. But if you have even a modest acquaintance with some of the secondary literature on Melville, I think you'll find this volume fascinating. Although I'm by no means a scholar or widely read in Melvilliana, I could not put the book down. Many of Prof. Parker's colleagues may be irritated by his straightforwardness in identifying flaws in others' work, but for those of us with no investment in one side or another -- for those of us who simply want to better understand one of our favorite authors -- "Melville Biography" is a precious resource.