In slow process is Ornery People, Parker’s retelling of outrageous stories found mainly on the Internet about his American ancestors whom he thought had lived and died unrecorded. Resting, waiting attention, is the “completed” Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative which engages three or four dozen writers on biography such as Holmes, Epstein, Backscheider, Bostridge, and Benton in the course of weighing the uses and misuses of evidence in biographical writing on Melville. In press early in 2011 is another biographical book, The Powell Papers: A Confidence Man Amok among the Anglo-American Literati.Īs Jay Leyda’s heir Parker expanded the documentary The Melville Log from 1,000 pages (in its 1969 enlargement) to 9,000 pages and is now condensing the first 3,000 pages down to 600 pages for the first of three print volumes.

Recent books with biographical bases include the Brian Higgins-Hershel Parker Reading Melville’s Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities (2006) and Parker’s Melville: The Making of the Poet (2008). Mauled by reviewers, that book slowly became a classic, as Google Books shows, gratefully applied to their problems by biblical, classical, and medieval scholars as well as by critics of more modern literature. Parker’s 1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction defied both the New Criticism and the New Bibliography in bringing biographical evidence to bear on textual theory, literary criticism, and literary theory.

The Association of American Publishers gave its top award to the first volume in “Literature and Language” (1997) and to the second volume in a new category, “Biography and Autobiography” (2003)-apparently the only time it gave anyone the top award twice. Hershel Parker is the author of the 1997 Pulitzer finalist, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins, 1996) and its continuation, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins, 2002).

Hershel parker melville