Sign-In
Cart
Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick
Paperback
Biographies GeneralLiterary FiguresLiterary Criticism
ISBN13: 9780062419040
Publisher: Ecco Press
Published: Jun 6 2017
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.30 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
A new account of Herman Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick, written by a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Biography and based on fresh archival research, which reveals that the anarchic spirit animating Melville's canonical work was inspired by his great love affair with a shockingly unconventional married woman.
Herman Melville's epic novel, Moby-Dick, was a spectacular failure when it was published in 1851, effectively ending its author's rise to literary fame. Because he was neglected by academics for so long, and because he made little effort to preserve his legacy, we know very little about Melville, and even less about what he called his wicked book. Scholars still puzzle over what drove Melville to invent Captain Ahab's mad pursuit of the great white whale.
In Melville in Love Pulitzer Prize-finalist Michael Shelden sheds light on this literary mystery to tell a story of Melville's passionate, obsessive, and clandestine affair with a married woman named Sarah Morewood, whose libertine impulses encouraged and sustained Melville's own. In his research, Shelden discovered unexplored documents suggesting that, in their shared resistance to the iron rule of social conformity, Sarah and Melville had forged an illicit and enduring romantic and intellectual bond. Emboldened by the thrill of courting Sarah in secret, the pleasure of falling in love, and the excitement of spending time with literary luminaries--like Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel Hawthorne--Melville found the courage to take the leap from light works of adventure to the hugely brilliant, utterly subversive Moby-Dick.
Filled with the rich detail and immense drama of Melville's secret life, Melville in Love tells the gripping story of how one of our greatest novelists found his muse.
Also in
Literary Figures
Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times
Sachs, Aaron
Hardcover
Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park
Vetch, Aaron
Cirino, Mark
Elder
Hardcover
Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root: A Prairie-Norwegian Father, Rebellion in Minneapolis, Basement Zen, Growing Up, Growing Tender
Storlie, Erik Fraser
Paperback
Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe
Ogden, Emily
Hardcover
Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft: A Memoir on Writing (Large Print Edition)
Coben, Harlan
Paperback
Travels with Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Steinbeck, John
Paperback
Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend
Romney, Rebecca
Paperback
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
Greenblatt, Stephen
Hardcover
Miss Greene's Secret: Based on the True Story of the Black Librarian Who Shaped the Morgan Library
Antona, Nicolas
Hardcover
Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A. A. Milne and the Creation of Winnie-The-Pooh
Brandreth, Gyles
Hardcover
The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceausescu's Romania
Müller, Herta
Hardcover
The War for Middle-Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945
Loconte, Joseph
Hardcover
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Winchester, Simon
Paperback
String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis: A Library of America Special Publication
Wallace, David Foster
Hardcover
The Agatha Christie Cure: What Reading the Queen of Crime Taught Me about Life
Rentzenbrink, Cathy
Hardcover
Eleven Days: The Fascinating True Account of Agatha Christie's Mysterious Disappearance
Thompson, Laura
Hardcover
Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casares, 1944-1959
Camus, Albert
Hardcover
The Apostle of Tennessee: The Indefatigable Life and Ministry of Father Aloysius Orengo
Pagetta, Joe
Paperback
The Making of Middle-Earth: The Worlds of Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings
Snyder, Christopher A.
Hardcover
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises
Blume, Lesley M. M.
Paperback
From Typewriter to Takeoff: The Life of Journalist and Aviatrix Harriet Quimby
Tyler, Norman
Paperback
Henry and June: From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary (1931-1932) of Anais Nin
Nin, Anaïs
Paperback