Hershel Parker

Hershel Parker is an American professor of English and literature, noted for his research into the works of Herman Melville. Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware.^[1] He is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1967, 2001, and 2017), and the General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, which, with the publication of volume 13, "Billy Budd, Sailor" and Other Uncompleted Writings, is now (2017) complete in fifteen volumes. Parker is the author of a two-volume biography of Herman Melville published by Johns Hopkins University Press (1996, 2002). Parker also edited the first ever one-volume edition of Melville's complete poetry, Herman Melville: Complete Poems, published by the Library of America in 2019.

Parker is an advocate of traditional methods of literary research, which emphasize access to original materials, encourage deliberate study of chronology, and examine the relationship between a literary work and the creative genius of its author.^[2] He has spoken out against academic schools of thought such as New Criticism, post structuralism and semiotics which ignore or downplay scholarly analysis of authorial intention.^[3]

In the mid-2010s Parker became a regular contributor to the webzine Journal of the American Revolution.^[4][5] Now his ongoing genealogical research in relation to American history has led to a new book guided by Alma MacDougall to publication on March 12, 2024 - An Okie's Racial Reckonings. Available now on Amazon as a Kindle ebook or Paperback. In the spirit of Jim Webb's Born Fighting but richly researched and detailed, it traces the involvement of Parker's newly identified ancestors in momentous episodes of American history. One disturbing chapter depicts a North Carolina kinsman who in 1873 won full pardons for all members of the KKK. His losing opponent was Albion W. Tourgée, later the novelist of the Reconstruction and the lawyer who lost Plessy v. Ferguson. Without engaging Eric Foner, this chapter clarifies and corrects his account in Reconstruction. Like Parker's articles in Journal of the American Revolution, this book is written not from other books but from historical documents, many of which he discovered. This is history from the ground up, a new experiment in the uses of genealogy in writing American history. The book is astonishingly pertinent to 2024 American politics.