num_pages: 446
description: If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick , Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.
language: English
title: Melville: His World and Work
titlecomplete: Melville: His World and Work
characters: Herman Melville
genres: American, Biography, Literature, American History, Criticism, Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, 19th Century, Biography Memoir
ratings_count: 411
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Lionel Trilling Book Award
publisher: Vintage Books - Random House