Melville: A Biography

Rating:
Summary: Horrible
Review: Laurie Robertson-Lorant's one-volume biography of Herman Melville is stunningly bad. In fact, it just may be the worst piece of historical writing I've ever come across.

This book was listed as "suggested reading" for a class I took on Moby Dick at Stanford University, which celebrated the 150th anniversary of that American classic. In fairness to the professor, he cautioned that he had not read "Melville" himself and strongly recommended the lengthy two-volume biography by Hershel Parker for those seriously interested in the life and times of the author. Relative brevity, it seems, is this book's only virtue.

Robertson-Lorant is a high school teacher and one can't help but wonder if one of her students actually wrote this book - and not a very talented one at that. The writing is tendentious, the footnoting extremely sloppy, and the structure jagged and disjointed. Not only is the style bad; the author also consistently manages to foul up some of the most basic details of American history, such as the roots of the term "Barnburner" and the circumstances behind the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, to name just a very few.

Undoubtedly, Herman Melville is one of the more interesting 19th century American novelists. His early adventures traveling the world on a Navy ship and whaler is fascinating, and the story of his early success and fame with "Typee" and his long, slow decline into frustrating obscurity thereafter is poignant and tragic. One thing is for certain: his life deserves better treatment than this.

Rating:
Summary: Horrible
Review: Laurie Robertson-Lorant's one-volume biography of Herman Melville is stunningly bad. In fact, it just may be the worst piece of historical writing I've ever come across.

This book was listed as "suggested reading" for a class I took on Moby Dick at Stanford University, which celebrated the 150th anniversary of that American classic. In fairness to the professor, he cautioned that he had not read "Melville" himself and strongly recommended the lengthy two-volume biography by Hershel Parker for those seriously interested in the life and times of the author. Relative brevity, it seems, is this book's only virtue.

Robertson-Lorant is a high school teacher and one can't help but wonder if one of her students actually wrote this book - and not a very talented one at that. The writing is tendentious, the footnoting extremely sloppy, and the structure jagged and disjointed. Not only is the style bad; the author also consistently manages to foul up some of the most basic details of American history, such as the roots of the term "Barnburner" and the circumstances behind the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, to name just a very few.

Undoubtedly, Herman Melville is one of the more interesting 19th century American novelists. His early adventures traveling the world on a Navy ship and whaler is fascinating, and the story of his early success and fame with "Typee" and his long, slow decline into frustrating obscurity thereafter is poignant and tragic. One thing is for certain: his life deserves better treatment than this.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent reading about Melville and his works
Review: This is the best Melville Biography currently available. It is not only well researched and presented, but also and this is very important especially in literary biographies, quite readable and accessible, especially when compared to the ponderous effort by Hershel Parker. The biography is also well-balanced presenting informative chapters from throughout Melville's life. This must have been quite difficult to do, especially for Melville's later years, as there are few primary sources available. The information about Meville's often eccentric and tragic family and family life is also most interesting adding breadth. While other Melville biographers have concentrated too much on the interpretation of "Moby-Dick", often offering nothing new, Robertson-Lorant gives the reader relevant information on all of Melvile's work, including his for many readers little known poetry. When interpretations are given, for "Moby-Dick" for example, they are on the mark. Here she makes an intertesting comparison between the three mates (Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask) and the three harpooners (Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo) in which the three "savages" become more "noble" than their white ships' officers. The biography concludes with an interesting analysis of Melville's sexuality. On the down side, there are some errors. For example, on the Civil War the contentions that Lee was surrounded at Gettysburg, or that one third of the participants on both sides were killed, (p.453) are just plain wrong. Luckily other errors are not so common as to detract the reader. In conclusion, I recommend this biography highly. It is accessible to both leisurly readers and persons knowledgable about Melville and his works. It is also reasonably priced.

Rating:
Summary: The best Melville biography currently available
Review: Unlike Hershel Parker's, Laurie Robertson-Lorant's Melville biography provides a brilliant historical narrative that shows the broad sweep of 19th-century American history, giving a vivid picture of all the issues which Melville addresses in his fiction and poetry. Since it also is an insightful critique of each of Melville's writings, Dr. Robertson-Lorant's Melville biography should be on the bookshelves of all students and lovers of American literature, history and biography.

Rating:
Summary: Best Melville biography currently available
Review: Unlike Hershel Parker's, Laurie Robertson-Lorant's Melville biography provides a brilliant historical narrative that shows the broad sweep of 19th-century American history,giving a vivid picture of all the issues which Melville addresses in his fiction and poetry. Since it also is an insightful critique of each of Melville's writings, Dr. Robertson-Lorant's Melville biography should be on the bookshelves of all students and lovers of American literature, history and biography.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant, sensitive life of America's finest writer.
Review: With extraordinary skill, brilliance, and sensitivity, Laurie Robertson-Lorant gives us the one-volume life of Herman Melville we've always needed. She ably mixes extensive research in the primary sources (including the recently discovered Gansevoort-Lansing family papers now held by The New York Public Library) with close and attentive reading of Melville's works and the contemporary reactions to them. In addition, nearly always steering clear of the clanky jargon of modern literary criticism, she nonetheless draws on cutting-edge work in that field, in particular the insights of feminist literary criticism, to illuminate our understanding of this remarkable figure who was arguably America's finest writer. Readers should devote special attention to Robertson-Lorant's superb appendix on Melville's sexuality, which is a model of how a modern biographer should address such controversial and frequently-trivialized issues.

If I have one complaint, it is that Robertson-Lorant is shaky on legal contexts, both of Melville's father-in-law, the noted Massachusets jurist Lemuel Shaw, and of the writer's final work, BILLY BUDD, SAILOR. I wish in particular that Robertson-Lorant had used some of the cutting-edge scholarship in the field of Law & Literature, in particular Richard Weisberg's fine book THE FAILURE OF THE WORD: THE LAWYER AS PROTAGONIST IN MODERN FICTION (Yale University Press, rev. ed. 1989). BILLY BUDD, SAILOR is a central work for this field, and arguments over Melville's intentions continue to rage on -- but they appear only fleetingly and tangentially in Robertson-Lorant's pages.

But these quibbles are comparatively minor. Laurie Robertson-Lorant's biography should be *the* biography of choice for anyone interested in Herman Melville's life and work. (It is far more accessible, nuanced, and lucidly argued than is Hershel Parker's long-awaited, mammoth two-volume life now in progress; Volume I is little better than a pile of facts heaped together.)

-- Richard B. Bernstein Adju! nct Professor of Law, New York Law School; Daniel M. Lyons Visiting Professor in American History, Brooklyn College/CUNY (1997-1998); Book Review Editor for Constitutional Books, H-LAW; Senior Research Fellow, Council on Citizenship Education, Russell Sage College