Melville.a Biography

8vo, 710pp. Lofty Origins -- Snug Investments -- Elegant Negligence -- Tormented with an Itch for Things Remote -- A Naturally Roving Disposition -- The Wild, the Watery, the Unshored -- The Floodgates of the Wonder-World -- A Little Experience in the Art of Book-Craft -- Fierce Cannibal Delight -- Creating the Creative -- The Man Who Lived Among the Cannibals -- The Prince of Whales -- The Ardent Virginian -- A Sort of Sea-Feeling in the Country -- One Grand Hooded Phantom -- Counter-friction to the Machine -- Shadows Foreshadowing Deeper Shadows -- What Sort of Bamboozling Story Is This? -- Childe Herman's Pilgrimage -- A Convulsed and Half-Dissolved Society -- Fierce Battles and Civil Strife -- A Time Rieh in Catastrophes -- A Survivor of the Civil War -- A Time When Peace Had Horrors of Its Own -- Agonies That Operate Unseen -- Devilish Tantalization of the Gods -- Confronting Sphinx and Angel -- The Hellish Society of Men -- The Rose Farmer in the Garden of Truant Eve Herman Melville's towering achievement stands as a timeless monument to the richness and diversity of nineteenth-century American Literature. He employed a particularly American idiom in his writing and his immortal masterpiece, Moby Dick, broke the boundaries of the novel as it was then known and understood.