In this major reconsideration of Herman MelvilleтАЩs life and work, Michael Paul Rogin shows that MelvilleтАЩs novels are connected both to the important issues of his time and to the exploits of his patrician and politically prominent familyтАФwhich, three generations after its Revolutionary War heroes, produced an alcoholic, a bankrupt, and a suicide. Rogin argues that a history of MelvilleтАЩs fiction, and of the society represented in it, is also a history of the writerтАЩs family. He describes how that family first engaged Melville in and then isolated him from American political and social life. MelvilleтАЩs brother and father-in-law are shown to link Moby-Dick to the crisis over expansion and slavery. White-Jacket and Billy Budd, which concern shipboard conflicts between masters and seamen, are related to an execution at sea in which MelvilleтАЩs cousin played a decisive part. The figure of MelvilleтАЩs father haunts The Confidence Man, whose subject is the triumph of the marketplace and the absence of authority.
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A provocative study of one of our supreme literary artists.