Masterpieces of American Literature
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Herman Melville

Author of the flawed and great Moby Dick.

Download Excerpts from Moby Dick

Herman Melville   (1819-1891)

A superb biography of Melville is available at the University of Virginia's American Studies website.    Click on the button below to read it.

Melville was the author of numerous Sea novels, in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper.  These works, although oveshadowed today by Moby Dick, are quite solid examples of the developing American novel.  Although Melville belongs to the Romanticism period and his works share many of the characteristics of the Romance, his works are early presentations of the novel.  The website known as Melville.org, although abandoned in 2000, contains a number of active links and documents on the life, works, biographies, and criticisms of Melville and his works.
Biography of Herman Melville
To Melville.Org website
                                                Melville and the Civil War

For almost ten years he had published nothing. Then, according to its preface, "in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond," he composed the  poetic sequence, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. It is chronological and  inclusive, beginning with an elegantly controlled epilogue, "The Portent," on  the hanging of John Brown, and ending with "A Meditation," an elegy urging  compassion toward the vanquished in the name of the valorous dead of both sides.  Melville has verses on almost every important event of the war, and he makes a point of including soldiers and sailors, blacks and whites, men and women, North and South. Some of them deserve to be counted among the best American poetry of  the nineteenth century, for example, "A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight," which is as much about the nature of war and problems of poetic language as it is a naval engagement, or "The Coming Storm," an occasional poem on  Lincoln's death based on a landscape painting and the Shakespearean actor who  owned it, but fundamentally about the tragic vision. Quite different from Whitman's Drum-Taps, it is the only comparable body of Civil War poetry. 

Harper and Brothers published the cycle in August 1866 in an edition of 1,200 copies, of which only 486 were sold in the first year and a half. The reviews were not good, though Melville was praised in certain quarters for the position he took in a "Supplement" urging generosity toward the defeated South. In Battle-Pieces Melville, writing to please himself, seems to have hoped for a wider audience. This mistake he did not make  again.

 Source:  Prof.  Andreas Tauber, Department of Philosophy, Brandis University.

An interesting development has taken place in the last 20 years or so among literary scholars of Civil War era literature.  Battle-Pieces is seen as the second best collection of Civil War poetry composed, surpassed only by Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Melville never returned to the popularity and acclaimed that he had achieved in his earlier "pot-boilers' novels Typee and Omoo.


To Excerpts from Moby Dick
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  • Home
    • What is STORY
    • The Elements of Fiction
    • What Is A Short Story
    • Literary Theory Guide
  • Lit. 214
    • Class Presentations
  • Colonial Period
    • Native American >
      • Red Jacket's Speech
      • Story Collections
      • Lyrics, Poems and Chants
    • Spanish Explorers
    • Early Colonial >
      • New England Primer
      • Anne Bradstreet
      • Mary Rowlandson
      • John Smith
      • John Winthrop
      • Colonial Song Lyrics
    • Colonial and Revolutionary >
      • Readings >
        • Ben Franklin >
          • Advice on the Choice of a Mistress
          • Excerpts from The Autobiography
          • A Tale
        • Phyllis Wheatly >
          • Poems
        • Thomas Paine >
          • Common Sense
        • Philip Freneau >
          • Freneau Poems
        • Thomas Jefferson >
          • Writings
        • Jupiter Hammon >
          • An Evening Thought
      • Lyrics
  • Romantic Period
    • Elements of American Romanticism
    • Authors >
      • Washington Irving >
        • Irving's Place >
          • Irving's Place2
        • Irving on the Tale
        • Rip Van Winkle
        • Rip 2
        • Rip 3
        • Poetry
      • James Fenimore Cooper >
        • LOTH Silent Movie
        • Chapter 32
        • Chapter 32 B
      • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. >
        • Selected Poems
      • Ralph Waldo Emerson >
        • Selected Writings
        • Transcendentalism
      • Edgar Allen Poe >
        • Poe's Approach to Fiction
        • Life of Poe
        • Selected Poems
        • "The Raven"
        • The Black Cat
        • The Tell-Tale Heart
      • William Cullen Bryant >
        • Bryants Poems
      • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow >
        • Selected Poetry
      • Margaret Fuller
      • Fanny Fern
      • Herman Melville >
        • Moby Dick
      • Nathaniel Hawthorne >
        • Scarlett Letter Excepts
        • Young Goodman Brown
      • C. Clement Moore
    • Lyrics >
      • Folk / Gospel
      • Parlor Music
      • Music Hall
      • Stephen Foster >
        • Music
      • George Root
  • Civil War Period
    • 1850 - 1861 >
      • Harriet Anne Jacobs
      • Francis Harper
      • Frederick Douglass
      • Songs of Protest, Freedom, Sadness
    • 1861 - 1866 >
      • Julie Ward Howe
      • Emily Dickinson
      • Walt Whitman >
        • Excerpts
      • Abraham Lincoln
      • Louisa May Alcott
      • Misc. Poets
      • Warriors & Memoirs
    • Civil War Songs