The bibliography of Herman Melville includes magazine articles, book reviews, other occasional writings, and 15 books. Of these, seven books were published between 1846 and 1853, seven more between 1853 and 1891, and one in 1924. Melville was 26 when his first book was published, and his last book was not released until 33 years after his death. At the time of his death he was on the verge of completing the manuscript for his first novel in three decades, Billy Budd, and had accumulated several large folders of unpublished verse.
The year 1853 saw a physical disaster that renders the books published by him in America prior to that date even more scarce today than would normally have been the case. At one o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, December 10, 1853, the establishment of Melville's publishers Harper Brothers was completely destroyed by fire, reportedly caused by a plumber throwing a lit candle into a bucket of camphene, which he mistook for water. The fire burned Harper's stock of Melville's unsold books, which consisted of Typee, 185; Omoo, 276; Mardi, 491; Redburn, 296; White Jacket, 292; Moby-Dick, 297; and Pierre, 494. Mardi and Pierre, Melville's two least popular books, had the largest number of unsold copies burned.[1]Isle of the Cross is a possible lost work that was rejected for publication in 1853. That year was also the beginning of the long period of unpopularity precipitated by the appearance of Pierre in 1852 and exacerbated by the publication of The Confidence-Man in 1857. Melville then turned his attention to poetry, to which he devoted more years than he had to fiction.[2]
A Melville revival that began in the 1920s led to the reprinting of many of his works, which had gone out of print in the United States. Raymond Weaver, Melville's first biographer, edited a 16-volume edition for the London publisher Constable, which included the first publication of Billy Budd.[3] In 1926, Moby-Dick was among the first titles in the newly founded Modern Library series. Beginning in 1948, independent publisher Walter Hendricks recruited scholars to edit annotated editions of Melville's works, beginning with a volume of his poetry.[4] Produced under the general editorship of Howard P. Vincent, the series was originally projected to include 14 volumes but in the end only 7 appeared.[5]
In the 1960s, Northwestern University Press, in alliance with the Newberry Library and the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, established ongoing publication runs of Melville's various titles.[6] The aim of the editors, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, was to present unmodernized "critical texts" which represented "as nearly as possible the author's intentions."[7] The editors adopted as "copy text" either the author's fair copy manuscript or the first printing based on it, which were then collated against any further printings in Melville's lifetime, since he might have made corrections or changes. In the case of Moby-Dick, for instance, after collating the American and British editions from the various printings, the editors adopted 185 revisions and corrections from the English edition and incorporated 237 emendations made by the editors. The "Editorial Appendixes" for each volume included an "Historical Note" on composition and publication, an extensive account of the editorial process, a list of emendations and changes, as well as related documents.[7]
Melville's lifetime earnings from his first seven books (over a period of 41 years, from 1846 to 1887) amounted to $10,444.53, of which $5,966.40 came from American publishers and $4,478.13 from British. The bestselling title in the United States was Typee (with 9,598 copies). The book that earned Melville the most in the United States was Omoo ($1,719.78).[8]
Murray purchased the English rights to print 1000 copies for £100. It first appeared in two parts in Murray's Home and Colonial Library, Part I, February 26, 1846; Part II, April 1, 1846. Four thousand copies of the first edition of the book were printed.
The American rights were purchased by Wiley & Putnam after John Murray had agreed to publish the book in England, so that the credit of having first recognized Melville belongs to Murray's London publishing house. It appeared in book form in 1846 simultaneously in New York and London, being one of the first works to be published in this manner.
The Sequel, containing "The Story of Toby", was written in July, 1846, and incorporated in the Revised Edition published in the same year. Extracts from the Sequel were also published prior to its appearance in book form. In England, John Murray paid an additional £50 for the Sequel, which was first printed as a small pamphlet in an edition of 1250 copies, and subsequently incorporated in the book.
Reprinted:
New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1847; Harpers, 1849 (new copyright, printed from original plates); 1850; 1855; 1857; 1865; 1871; 1876; Arthur Stedman, Ed., 1892; 1896; W. Clark Russell, Ed., 1904; Ernest Rhys, Ed., 1907; W. Clark Russell, Ed., 1911; A. L. Sterling, Ed., 1920; Ernest Rhys, Ed., 1921.
Boston: Arthur Stedman, Ed., 1900; 1910; 1919; W. P. Trent, Ed., 1902.
London: John Murray, 1847 (1000 copies); 1848 (1000 copies); 1850; 1855 (750 copies); 1861; 1866; 1877 (500 copies); 1893 (1000 copies) ; Routledge, 1855 (6000 copies) ; 1910; H. S. Salt, Ed., 1892; 1898, 1899; W. P. Trent, Ed., 1903; W. Clark Russell, Ed., 1904; 1910; Ernest Rhys, Ed., 1907; 1921.
The manuscript was written in 1846, and the book was published in March, 1847. In England, John Murray paid £150 for the copyright. Together with Typee, Omoo was one of the earliest works to be published simultaneously in New York and London. The first English edition consisted of 4000 copies.
The Harper Brothers published in New York the same year. In their catalog for 1847 the book was advertised: "Muslin $1.25, paper $1.00." In 1849 Harper advertised: "In two parts 50 cents each, or complete in muslin gilt $1.25."
Reprinted:
New York: Harpers, 1847 (four re-printings); 1855; 1863; 1868; Arthur Stedman, Ed., 1892 (new copyright); 1896; H. Clark Russell, Ed., 1904; 1911; Ernest Rhys, Ed., 1908, 1921.
Boston: Arthur Stedman, Ed., 1900; 1910; 1919.
London: John Murray, 1848 (1000 copies); 1849; 1850; 1861 (1000 copies); 1866; 1877 (500 copies); 1893 (1000 copies); Routledge, 1855 (6000 copies); 1910; H. S. Salt, Ed., 1892; 1893; H. Clark Russell, Ed., 1904; 1911; Ernest Rhys, Ed., 1908; 1921.
The novel appeared in two volumes on March 16, 1849, in London (1000 copies), and on April 14, 1849, in New York in three volumes. It was the first Melville book published in England by Bentley. Raymond Weaver stated that up to February 22, 1850, 2154 copies were sold.
The manuscript was written in New York during the summer of 1849. The book appeared on August 18, 1849, in New York, and on September 29, 1849, in London (750 copies). Weaver stated that up to February 22, 1850, 4011 copies were sold.
The manuscript was written in New York City during the summer of 1849. In November of that year Melville went to London to dispose of it. Richard Bentley offered £200 for the English rights to print 1000 copies. The manuscript was refused by Murray, Colbour, and Moxon. Finally, in December, Bentley confirmed his previous offer, and accepted the manuscript for publication at the end of March, 1850 (1000 copies). The American Harpers edition came after the English.
Reprinted:
New York: Harper, 1855; Arthur Stedman, Ed., 1892; 1896.
The manuscript was written at Arrowhead, Massachusetts, in 1850–1851 and was first published in October, 1851. In England Richard Bentley agreed to pay £150 for the first 1000 copies, and half profits thereafter. The American edition (Harpers: 1 volume) is subsequent to the English (3 volumes, 500 copies) and contained thirty-five passages omitted from the English edition. The published price was $1.50.
Reprinted:
New York: Harper, 1863, Arthur Stedman, Ed., 1892; 1896. Another edition, 1892; 1899; Ernest Rhys, Ed., 1907; 1921. Dodd Mead, 1922.
Boston: Arthur Stedman, Ed., 1900; 1910; 1919.
London: Bentley, 1853; L. Becke, Ed., 1901; Ernest Rhys, Ed., 1907; 1921. Another edition, 1912; Viola Meynell, Ed., 1920; 1921.
The manuscript was written at Arrowhead, Massachusetts, from late 1851 through early 1852 and was first published in August, 1852. Copies issued in England in November of that year consist of the American sheets, with a cancel title = Pierre : Or The Ambiguities. By Herman Melville. London:Sampson Low Son and Co., 47 Ludgate Hill. 1852.[9]
Published in April 1855, by Putnam, having previously appeared serially in Putnam's Monthly Magazine, July 1854 – March 1855.) A pirated edition was published under the title The Refugee in Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1865.
Edited by Raymond Weaver. Published posthumously as Billy Budd, Foretopman, part of a sixteen volume edition of Melville's Complete Works for the London publisher. A second text, F. Barron Freeman Ed., was published in 1948, as Melville's Billy Budd by the Harvard University Press. In 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., established what is now considered the text closest to Melville's intentions; published by the University of Chicago Press as Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative).
Short stories
The publication dates of Melville's stories in no way correspond to their dates of composition; with editorial considerations, such as length vs. amount of space available, usually determining when they would appear. The Piazza Tales was the only collection of Melville's stories published under his direct supervision. The volume sold slowly in spite of generally favorable notices. Its publishers, Dix & Edwards, dissolved their partnership in 1857 and, it appears, paid the author no royalties on either this book or their other published title of his, The Confidence Man. The plates were put up for sale at publishers' auction but attracted no bidders. As one editor commented, "no one would risk a dollar on Melville."[12]
The plates were subsequently sold for scrap. In 1922, during the Melville revival, there was a complete resetting of the book for its publication in the Constable edition of Melville's Complete Works. That same year saw the Princeton University Press issue a collection of the remaining known stories under the title The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches. The final two stories in the list were discovered in the box turned over to biographer Raymond Weaver by Melville's granddaughter (the same box which yielded Billy Budd) and appeared in the final Constable volume titled Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces.[13]
Collected in The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches (1922) by Princeton University Press, which includes the essay, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850), and contains an introductory note by Henry Chapin. Internet Archive has four versions of the scanned book.[14]
Collected in The Piazza Tales. Melville received a monthly payment of $50 for each of the three installments for a total of $150.[15] He received no additional payment from the Piazza Tales because the collection never generated any royalties.[16]
Originally rejected by Harper's because it might offend religious sensibilities,[17] it was subsequently printed from manuscript as a part of Constable's Works, Raymond Weaver editor[13]
First printed in London, Volume 13 of Constable's Works[18]
Poetry
Melville's reputation as a poet rose dramatically in the late 20th century. After the disastrous publication of The Confidence-Man in 1857, Melville turned to the writing of poetry. Virtually ignored by the public and scorned by reviewers, he nevertheless persevered in this endeavor for the next 30 years. Early biographers conveyed the perception of Melville as a novelist who dabbled unsuccessfully in verse. Despite early claims for him as one of the three best American poets before 1900,[19] histories of American poetry for many years all but ignored him. The neglect was partly because until the Northwestern-Newberry edition, the poetry was available only in incomplete "complete" editions, selections, reprints, and editions of individual titles—most of these out of print, few of them textually reliable, and all of them together falling well short of completeness. "That Melville was a poet only in prose is a truth almost universally acknowledged among his critics, one guaranteed to endure as long as the poems remain unavailable in a complete, reliable edition."[20]
In July 2009 Northwestern-Newberry released Published Poems: The Writings of Herman Melville Vol. 11 the most complete collection to date, containing substantial scholarly notes on individual poems. The final volume (12), Billy Budd and Other Later Manuscripts contains the unpublished poems.[21] The fact remains that Melville wrote fiction for 11 years, poetry for over 30. Although it is true he wrote more prose than poetry, the same can be said of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot both of whom wrote less verse than Melville did. With Clarel he wrote one of the longest poems in the English language. If one includes the poems contained in his novels his entire poetic oeuvre approaches the size of Lord Byron's or Robert Browning's.
Melville tried to have his early collected poems printed in 1860, offering them to two publishers who rejected the work. The contents of the volume were then lost or dispersed into later works.[23]
1200 copies were printed of which only 486 were sold by February 13, 1868. In the seven years that followed, only eleven additional copies were sold.[24] Published price: $1.75. The book was not issued in England. Melville states that "with few exceptions, the pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond..." Of the poems included in this volume, the following had already appeared in magazines:
"The March to the Sea," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, February 1866.
"The Cumberland," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, March 1866.
"Philip," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, April 1866.
"Chattanooga," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, June 1866.
"Gettysburg: July, 1863," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, July 1866.
The work was Melville's last commercially funded publication of any sort.[20] He lost $400 on the volume.
2 volumes; published price $3.00. The book was not issued in England. Published in July 1876 at the expense of Melville's uncle, Peter Gansevoort. The manuscript had been in existence for some time.[1]
The volume contains 19 poems. The edition was privately printed and limited to 25 copies.[1] Princeton University press issued an edition in 1922 edited by Henry Chapin.[25]
The volume contains 43 poems, was privately printed and limited to 25 copies.
Single poems
"The Admiral of the White," published in 1885 in both the New York Daily Tribune and the Boston Herald.[26]
Uncollected or unpublished in Melville's lifetime
Weeds and Wildings, with a Rose or Two (1924) A book of poems written for his wife and dedicated to her. Unpublished at the time of his death although a fair copy had been made by Elizabeth Melville for the printer. First published in Volume 16 of the Constable edition of Melville's Works (London 1924), then reprinted in a somewhat different order and form in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, Chicago 1947.[27][28]
"Epistle to Daniel Shepherd" – first published in Herman Melville: Representative Selections, Willard Thorp, Ed. (New York, 1938).[29]
The following were first published in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, Howard P. Vincent Ed. (Chicago 1947):
"Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh" [sic]
"The Haglets" (an expansion of "The Admiral of the White")
"To Tom"
"Suggested by the Ruins of a Mountain-temple in Arcadia"
^Buell, Lawrence (1998). "Melville The Poet". In Levine, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Melville. Cambridge University Press. Archived from the original on May 12, 2016.. p. 136
^Herman Melville, The Works of Herman Melville (London: Constable 1922–1924).
^ abMelville, Herman (1988) [1851]. "Note on the Text". In Harrison Hayford; G. Thomas Tanselle; Hershel Parker (eds.). Moby-Dick or the Whale (Newberry Library Volume 6 ed.). Evanston, Chicago: Northwestern University Press. pp. 763–64. ISBN0-8101-0268-4.
^Tanselle, G. Thomas (April 1969). "The Sales of Melville's Books". Harvard Library Bulletin. XVII (2): 199. Archived from the original on 29 March 2012. Retrieved 25 September 2011.
^Melville, Herman (1960). Merrell R. Davis; William H. Gilman (eds.). The letters of Herman Melville. New Haven, Yale University Press. p. 188, note 9.
^ abSealts, Merton M. (1982). "The Reception of Melville's Short Fiction (1979)". Pursuing Melville, 1940-1980. Madison: Univ of Wisconsin Press. p. 235. ISBN0-299-08870-7. Pursuing Melville 1940-1980.
^Sattelmeyer, Robert; Barbour, James (November 1978). "The Sources and Genesis of Melville's "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow"". American Literature. 50 (3): 398–417. doi:10.2307/2925135. JSTOR2925135.
^E.g.: "Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville seem to me the best poets of the 19th Century here in America. Melville's poetry has been grotesquely underestimated, but of course it is only in the last four or five years that it has been much read." (Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. New York: Knopf, 1953)
^ abSpengemann, William C. (Winter 1999). "Melville the Poet". American Literary History. 11 (4): 569–609. doi:10.1093/alh/11.4.569. JSTOR490271.
^Renker, Elizabeth (Spring–Summer 2000). "Melville the Poet: Response to William Spengemann". American Literary History. 12 (1/2): 348–354. doi:10.1093/alh/12.1-2.348. JSTOR490257.
^Buell, Lawrence (1998). "Melville The Poet". In Robert Steven Levine (ed.). The Cambridge companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 153. ISBN0-521-55477-2.
^Bridgman, Richard (Summer 1966). "Melvilles' Roses". Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 8 (2): 235–244. JSTOR40753898.
^Braswell, William (January 1948). "Review: Collected Poems of Herman Melville. Edited by Howard P. Vincent". American Literature. 19 (4): 367. doi:10.2307/2921491. JSTOR2921491.
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