THE PRIVATE MELVILLE

The Private Melville is a delight to read. Wise, learned, witty, and thoughtful, it moves very smoothly even when it is covering tangled biographical and scholarly ground. In fact, it doesnt read like a scholarly book at all, even though it is based on an extremely close and detailed and almost loving reading of sources, interpretations, and archival alluvia.-Giles Gunn, University of California, Santa Barbara The Private Melville is personal, even private (as the topic mandates), and idiosyncratic, it is opinionated and provocative. It contains no trace of fashionable jargon