Herman Melville

A little about the book

Lewis Mumford approaches Herman Melville as a writer whose imaginative work cannot be separated from the pressures and contradictions of his life. The book follows the movement from youthful experience and seafaring adventure toward the ambitious fiction through which Melville tested questions of authority, belief, isolation, and human fellowship. Individual books become stages in a continuing intellectual struggle rather than items in a simple list of publications.

This is an interpretive literary biography, with Mumford using the fiction to think about the man who produced it and the American society around him. His account is therefore interested in the meanings and patterns of a career as well as its outward events. Readers of Moby-Dick will find a wider context for that novel, while readers new to Melville can use the biography as an introduction to the concerns running across his work. Mumford’s own strong judgments remain visible throughout, making the book a meeting between two writers and their different understandings of American cultural life.

Things You May Not Know About Herman Melville

• A 1929 literary biography. Harcourt, Brace published Mumford’s study in 1929, placing it within the period when Melville was attracting renewed attention from twentieth-century readers.
• Three large movements. The book’s principal divisions are titled The Olympian, The Titan, and The Pilgrim, giving Melville’s career an explicitly interpretive shape.
• Moby-Dick has its own chapter. A chapter devoted to Moby-Dick sits within a broader treatment of Melville’s writing, rather than standing as the biography’s sole subject.
• Life and work are read together. Mumford’s preface explains his interest in Melville’s life and thought, preparing readers for interpretation rather than a narrowly documentary chronology.
• A painted frontispiece. The source edition includes a portrait of Melville by J. O. Eaton, placing a visual representation of the subject before the biography.