MackyBeth

This user page should be of service to those interested in Herman Melville. In March 2016 I contributed thousands of bytes to the Benito Cereno and The Piazza Tales pages.

Wikipedia Melville pages

Illustration to Ch. 87, "The Grand Armada." The environmental dimensions of Moby-Dick has yet to make its impact.

In recent years Wikipedia has developed into a resource so ubiquitous as to be everybody's first tool of orientation in whatever field of knowledge. Readers new to a writer will see the Wikipedia pages about that author before encountering his writings themselves. Therefore, attracting a new audience for a writer is a cause that can be helped with well-developed Wikipedia pages, and organizations such as the Melville Society can do no better than to encourage their members to participate in developing them. My aim is to help develop the Herman Melville content on Wikipedia. Melvilleans who are not familiar enough with Wikipedia to know what it aspires to may be pleased to find out that a serious encyclopedic format exists for articles on books: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Novels This guideline shows that for Melville it should not be difficult to develop the pages, since topics required by the manual such as composition, publication history, reception and later critical history of a work are covered in each of the volumes of the Northwestern-Newberry Melville edition.

Letters found after the publication of Correspondence

Not long after the Northwestern-Newberry Correspondence (1993) was published a few Melville letters were newly discovered. These letters, with transcriptions, were published in Melville Society Extracts, now online for all to see. So if you have that volume, simply access the links below, print out the pages and put them somewhere in your volume to assemble a complete edition of all letters yet known.

A letter from 1890:

June 1995, Lynn Horth, "Lost Letter Found."

In 1849, and again in 1856,Melville applied for a passport:

September 1995, Hershel Parker and Steven-Olsen Smith, "Three New Melville Letters."

Coincidentally, this last issue of Leviathan contains the review of Correspondence as well.

A letter from 1847:

March 1998, Richard Colles Johnson, "A New Melville Letter."

Books found after publication of Sealts's Melville's Reading (1988)

Direct links for the three supplementary notes Sealts wrote in 1990, 1995, and 1998 are provided at Merton M. Sealts, Jr.. A fourth note, co-authored with Sealts's successor on the subject, Steven Olsen-Smith, appeared in Leviathan.

Melville painted by Rembrandt

Melville explicating his work

This painting is from 1628, but Rembrandt's model looks like Melville, don't you think?

Melvillean Titles for Melvilleans

Lest I should take this too seriously, let me remind myself of Melville's use of humor. In chapter 17 of Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, "Young America in Literature," the Complete Works of Pierre Glendinnig are summed up:

The Tropical Summer: a Sonnet.
The Weather: a Thought.
Life: an Impromptu.
The late Reverend Mark Graceman: an Obituary.
Honor: a Stanza.
Beauty: an Acrostic.
Edgar: an Anagram.
The Pippin: a Paragraph.

Is Edgar meant as an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe? More titles of this type may be thought of:

Contract: a Signature.
The Scholar: a Footnote.

Or why not a tribute to Melvilleans with a pun on their contributions?

John Bryant: an Inkstand; or, How Fluid Can a Text Be.
Walker Cowen: an Underlining.
Brian Higgins: a Summary.
Wilson Heflin: a Log.
Eleanor Metcalf: a Memoir.
Hershel Parker: an Archive.
Merton M. Sealts, Jr.: a #.
Lynn Horth: a Letter.
Steven Olsen-Smith: an Annotation.
Mary Bercaw: a Source.
Jay Leyda: a Documentation.
William Reese: a Collection.
G. Thomas Tanselle: a Copy-Text.
Robert K. Wallace: an Etching.
Stanley T. Williams: a Dissertation.