 Herman Melville, 1870. Oil painting by Joseph Oriel Eaton. | |
| Novels↙ | 11 |
|---|---|
| Articles↙ | 8 |
| Stories↙ | 17 |
| Collections↙ | 5 |
| Unfinished works↙ | 1 |
| References and footnotes | |
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the manuscript for his first novel in three decades, Billy Budd, and had accumulated several large folders of unpublished verse.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]
- ^ Minnigerode, Meade (1922). Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography. New York: The Brock Row Book Shop, Inc. pp. 95–100.
- ^ 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).
- ^ Library of Congress listings
- ^ Gunn, Giles B. (2005). A Historical Guide to Herman Melville. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 226. ISBN 0-19-514281-0.
- ^ About Northwestern University Press Archived 2011-09-21 at the Wayback Machine Search at NU Press website Archived 2011-09-28 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b Melville, 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. ISBN 0-8101-0268-4.
- ^ 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.