page_title: Herman Melville (book)
section_title: Conception and publication
hierarchical_section_title: Herman Melville (book) / Conception and publication
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Herman Melville. Commissioned and presented to the family by Melville's brother-in-law, John Hoadley. The portrait now hangs in the Edison and Newman Room in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.
context_page_description: Herman Melville is a biography of the American author Herman Melville by Lewis Mumford, first published in 1929. Mumford, who felt a close affinity with Melville, gives both an account of the author's life and an interpretation of his works in the book, devoting particular attention to Moby-Dick and the later works published thereafter. The book played a role in the Melville revival of the 1920s, helping to affirm the author's reputation and to indicate connections between his work and later literature. The book was later republished under the title Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision.
context_section_description: Lewis Mumford viewed Herman Melville as a kindred spirit with whom he shared certain concerns and problems, as well as certain life experiences. Mumford was intrigued by Melville's personality, his personal development and his vision of life, and saw Melville as an unorthodox moral philosopher. He had previously discussed Melville in his book The Golden Day (1926), in which he had argued for a mid-19th-century American literary canon comprising Melville alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, all of whom he argued reflected the American culture of the period, which would soon be destroyed by the American Civil War and late-19th-century industrialization.
  Conceiving of the biography in 1927, Mumford envisioned it as the most ambitious project of his career to that point. The book was written over the space of a year, in what he described to his friend Henry Murray as a state of near "euphoria". Mumford visited the New York Public Library to examine the correspondence of Melville's friend Evert Augustus Duyckinck and read Melville's own journals, provided to him by the author's granddaughter. His research for the book was subject to financial constraints: he and his wife were expecting a child, and so he aimed for the book to be published by early 1929. Mumford's three previous books had been published by Boni & Liveright, but Horace Liveright was unenthusiastic about the Melville biography, so Mumford went instead to Harcourt, Brace & Company. On its publication, Herman Melville was selected for Carl Van Doren's Literary Guild. A revised edition was published in 1962 with the title Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision.
caption: Herman Melville, as depicted in 1870 by Joseph Oriel Eaton
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