MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE--Relishing the run of pleasant news, Day 2.

Same message--different new review:
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.

Here is the one Scalini and her friend liked best, posted two weeks ago:
5.0 out of 5 stars
written in an accessible but provocatively intelligent style that consistently shows the author to advantage against ...
By Roger A. Stritmatter on April 2, 2018
Format: Hardcover
This is an impressive book by a highly disciplined and insightful scholar of Herman Melville, written in an accessible but provocatively intelligent style that consistently shows the author to advantage against his many and well-endowed critics who got into the academy because they went to the right prep schools. In this book, the author who was once dismissed by the grand poohbahs of the academic establishment as "innocent of biography," shares some of his biography in this book. But what is impressive here is not so much the mettle of the biography of the working class, part-Cherokee, part-Choctaw Parker, got ahead in his scholarship by working hard, and often thinking more critically and more productively than those around him, but the quality of the scholarship that roves easily from biographical anecdote to literary insight or pop lecture on bibliographical method that is truly enlightening. If, like you me, you fancy yourself sometimes a Melville scholar, pick any topic you like from this book, and you are sure to learn something you didn't already know or possibly have your mind changed through the persuasive arrangement of evidence, carefully gleaned and painstakingly recorded from original examination of original documents, that is the hallmark of Hershel Parker's style.

If, on the other hand, you are new to the study of Melville, this book is a great, readable, insightful introduction to one of the most fascinating sagas in American literary studies.