Melville: His World and Work

Melville: His World and Work

If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that<b> </b>Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of <i>Typee</i> to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond<i> Moby Dick</i>, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.