Herman Melville
by Newton Arvin
Summary
Newton Arvin's Herman Melville is a critical biography, which means the life and the books explain each other. Arvin traces the collapse of Melville's merchant family, the father who died broken when the boy was twelve, the genteel mother left to manage ruin, and shows how a young man from that wreckage went to sea, jumped ship in the Marquesas, and turned the adventure into Typee and Omoo. The center of the book is Moby Dick, which Arvin reads chapter by chapter as the point where Melville's whaling experience, his reading of Shakespeare and the Bible, and his friendship with Hawthorne fused into something no American had written before. The later chapters follow the long silence: the failure of Pierre, the customs house years in New York, the poetry almost nobody read, and Billy Budd left in manuscript at his death in 1891. Arvin taught literature at Smith College for thirty eight years, and the writing shows a teacher's gift for making a difficult author feel urgent. Alfred Kazin called the book the wisest and most balanced single piece of writing on Melville, praising its feeling for the human values burning inside the work. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1951, the award's second year, at the crest of the Melville revival that lifted a forgotten writer into the center of the American canon. Arvin's own story ended in public cruelty: a 1960 arrest for possessing homoerotic material cost him his career at Smith. Truman Capote, who loved him and called him my Harvard, endowed a prize for literary criticism in his memory.
Historical Context & Significance
Melville died in 1891 so obscure that newspapers misspelled his name, and the revival that rescued him began only in the 1920s. By midcentury the recovery needed consolidating, and Arvin's 1950 biography did that work, joining the scholarship of the revival to serious criticism of the novels. It won the 1951 National Book Award over stiff competition and helped fix Moby Dick at the center of American literature courses, where it has stayed. Arvin himself became a cautionary figure in a different history: the 1960 raid that ended his career is now studied as an episode of the era's persecution of gay men, Smith College later honored his memory, and his books on Hawthorne and Whitman kept his criticism alive long after the headlines faded.