Book Description

"Consequently, to fill the gaps within the correspondence, 542 editorial entries are chronologically interspersed for letters both by and to Melville for which no full text has been located but for which some evidence survives. These entries, like the editorial headnotes for the known letters, flesh out the specific historical and biographical contexts for the unlocated letters. Both supply Horth's full annotations, placing circumstances, persons, and allusions, from a wide range of documentary and scholarly sources, and drawing upon family archives of both Melville and his wife, including the recently recovered portion, now in the New York Public Library, of a trove preserved by his sister Augusta." "The aim of this edition, volume fourteen in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, is to present a text as close to the author's intention at the time of inscription as his difficult handwriting or other surviving evidence permits. On this basis, the texts earlier presented in The Letters of Herman Melville (1960), edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, have been revised, with differences in almost every letter in spelling and punctuation, and some forty-five differences in wording. Fifty-two newly discovered letters by Melville, more than half of which are first published here, are added to those printed in the 1960 edition. This text of Correspondence is an Approved Text of the Committee on Scholarly Editions (Modern Language Association of America)."--BOOK JACKET.