Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

First published in 1921, Raymond M. Weaver's Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic is the biography that rescued Melville from decades of neglect and launched the modern revival of his reputation. Drawing on family papers and recollections supplied by the novelist's granddaughter, Weaver follows Melville from a childhood shadowed by his father's decline, through the whaling voyages and South Sea adventures that fed Typee and Moby-Dick, to the quiet, unrecognized final years in New York. Portraying Melville as a mystic mariner whose genius outstripped his age, Weaver wrote with the urgency of a critic determined to restore a great American writer to his rightful place. This edition reproduces the complete, unabridged original text, accompanied by a new introduction and reader's notes that set Weaver's landmark study in context—explaining both its enduring insights and the judgments that later scholarship has revised. Part of The Founding Texts Library.