“Damned by
Dollars: Moby Dick and the Price of Genius”
Lecture & Book Signing With Author Hershel
Parker
The San Francisco Maritime Park presents a lecture
and book signing by the master of Melville scholars, Hershel Parker.
On the heels of the publication of his concluding volume of Herman
Melville’s definitive biography, Hershel Parker will be speaking
about the life and times of Herman Melville. Given to standing room
only crowds on the East Coast, you won’t want to miss hearing this
unique talk from the master of Melville scholars. Parker will also
be signing copies of both volumes of the Melville biography and any
of his other works. Parker’s Herman Melville Vol. 2 will be on
sale at the Maritime Museum Building on Tuesday, October 22, 2002 at
7pm.
A finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, the first
volume of Hershel Parker’s magnificent biography of Herman
Melville revealed many new episodes in the writer’s early life and
profoundly deepened what was already known about these years
(1819-1851) of boundless ambition and exuberance. The eagerly
awaited second volume redefines the last forty years of Melville’s
life, from 1851 to 1891, a period scanted by all earlier
biographers. The concluding volume of this magisterial project
begins with the author awaiting reviews of Moby-Dick, a book he knew
to be his masterpiece and felt sure would provide the financial
security he needed to continue as a full-time writer. Shockingly, to
both Melville and to posterity, the most influential reviewers on
both sides of the Atlantic failed to recognize the novel’s
originality and genius, and Melville would spend the rest of his
life trying to recover from this blow.
Through prodigious archival research and with
profound psychological sympathy and a novelist’s eye for brilliant
detail, Parker creates an intense narrative of Melville’s life
after Moby-Dick’s failure, detailing his setbacks and triumphs,
his struggles and successes, the biographical and social context of
his intellectual pursuits and the transformation of his world into
his fiction. Working from almost 10,000 pages of documents, Parker
dazzlingly delineates the later Herman Melville; ambitious advocate
of literary friends’ dinner tables; laborer tortured by secret
debts; exquisitely suffering Stoic; companionable recluse; loving
domestic tyrant; and bargain-bin connoisseur.
That Hershel Parker’s biography of Melville will prove to be
definitive is beyond question; that the concluding volume, like its
predecessor, possesses both the same vividness, immediacy, and drama
as a novel by Dickens or Balzac – along with the highest standard
of historical scholarship – is an unparalleled marvel.
