John Marr and Other Sailors, with Some Sea-pieces

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Kent State University Press, 2006 - Literary Criticism - 235 pages

A facsimile edition of Melville's rare volume including the author's proofreading corrections

Late in his life, Herman Melville published a volume of poetry called John Marr and Other Sailors. He produced the collection at his expense, and therefore only about 25 copies were printed. Existing copies can be found in libraries, but scholars have, for the most part, not seen them.

John Marr and Other Sailors is a complete facsimile reprint of the original edition as Melville published it that also offers additional materials that allow readers to study the book as Melville conceived it. Robillard provides excerpts from the author's manuscript, printer's copy with corrections, the galley proofs with Melville's instructions about the structure of the book, and the page proofs, thereby offering a complete record of one of his books from manuscript to print. Many scholars have been dismissive of Melville's poetry and his writing during the last years of his life. But Melville was a hard-working, professional writer during his later years, writing new poems and changing and correcting older poems. As evident in this edition, he was distilling the hard-earned knowledge of many years and the poetic skills he had been perfecting. For this reason, John Marr is as important as any of his prose fictions.

Melville scholars and textual editors will appreciate this addition to the study of this great American literary figure and his work.

From inside the book

Contents

JOHN MARR
21
BRIDEGROOM DICK 27
45
TOM DEADLIGHT
53
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was born into a seemingly secure, prosperous world, a descendant of prominent Dutch and English families long established in New York State. That security vanished when first, the family business failed, and then, two years later, in young Melville's thirteenth year, his father died. Without enough money to gain the formal education that professions required, Melville was thrown on his own resources and in 1841 sailed off on a whaling ship bound for the South Seas. His experiences at sea during the next four years were to form in part the basis of his best fiction. Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were partly romance and partly autobiographical travel books set in the South Seas. Both were popular successes, particularly Typee, which included a stay among cannibals and a romance with a South Sea maiden. During the next several years, Melville published three more romances that drew upon his experiences at sea: Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both fairly realistic accounts of the sailor's life and depicting the loss of innocence of central characters; and Mardi (1849), which, like the other two books, began as a romance of adventure but turned into an allegorical critique of contemporary American civilization. Moby Dick (1851) also began as an adventure story, based on Melville's experiences aboard the whaling ship. However, in the writing of it inspired in part by conversations with his friend and neighbor Hawthorne and partly by his own irrepressible imagination and reading of Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists Melville turned the book into something so strange that, when it appeared in print, many of his readers and critics were dumbfounded, even outraged. By the mid-1850s, Melville's literary reputation was all but destroyed, and he was obliged to live the rest of his life taking whatever jobs he could find and borrowing money from relatives, who fortunately were always in a position to help him. He continued to write, however, and published some marvelous short fiction pieces Benito Cereno" (1855) and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) are the best. He also published several volumes of poetry, the most important of which was Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), poems of occasionally great power that were written in response to the moral challenge of the Civil War. His posthumously published work, Billy Budd (1924), on which he worked up until the time of his death, became Melville's last significant literary work, a brilliant short novel that movingly describes a young sailor's imprisonment and death. Melville's reputation, however, rests most solidly on his great epic romance, Moby Dick. It is a difficult as well as a brilliant book, and many critics have offered interpretations of its complicated ambiguous symbolism. Darrel Abel briefly summed up Moby Dick as "the story of an attempt to search the unsearchable ways of God," although the book has historical, political, and moral implications as well. Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, at age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York, along with his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville.

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