Start of benign review of the final NN volume. I wish he had looked at what was in the volume.

But this is a chance for a reviewer to show what a great critic he or she is. Too bad, though, not to review the whole volume and to discuss textual decisions.

The Loved One

Christopher Benfey
May 10, 2018 Issue
Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Robert A. Sandberg, and G. Thomas Tanselle, with a historical note by Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press/ Newberry Library, 998 pp., $115.00; $45.00 (paper)

Everett Collection

Terence Stamp in Peter Ustinov’s film adaptation of Billy Budd, 1962
When Herman Melville died at seventy-two, in September 1891, he had been out of public view for so long that The New York Times identified him as Henry Melville. An obituary writer expressed surprise that the author best known for Typee—his first novel, set in the South Seas, notorious for its Gauguin-like sexual exploits with native women—had not died much earlier. Melville had outlived his two sons: one killed himself with a gunshot to the head, the other survived shipwreck and other mishaps to die, a feckless wanderer, of tuberculosis.
Melville had outlived his reputation as well.