Meticulous detail and a plethora of sources are the hallmarks of this immersive exploration into Herman Melville, his family, and his social circle.

Each aspect is examined with great care, presenting a comprehensive picture.

Although not every single piece of information shared may immediately grip the reader's attention, when considered as a whole, it is undeniably worthwhile.

It offers valuable insights into the life and times of Melville, shedding light on the factors that influenced his works.

I can't help but think that Ishmael, the narrator of Melville's famous novel "Moby-Dick," would give his approval.

After all, this in-depth look delves into the very essence of the man who created him.

It provides a deeper understanding of Melville's creative process and the world in which he lived.

Overall, it is a fascinating and engaging read for anyone interested in Herman Melville and his literary contributions.

I feel as if I know even less about Herman Melville after perusing this than I did prior to it.

There is a scholarly database that encompasses all known letters and ephemera, meticulously tracking the locations and events in the lives of the greater Melville family. However, it is completely devoid of analysis.

Whenever any threads are connected beyond what can be gathered from contemporary accounts, Parker portrays the Melvilles as saints who never committed a sin.

This database is useful for ascertaining where a Melville was at a specific time, but it is entirely worthless beyond that.

It fails to provide any deeper insights or interpretations into the complex lives and works of the Melville family, leaving the reader with a sense of dissatisfaction and a longing for more comprehensive and meaningful exploration.

This biography is scrupulously documented, with a great deal of care and comprehensiveness. It delves deep into the life of the subject, leaving no stone unturned. However, at times, it gets lost in the tedious everyday details. This makes it an extremely useful resource for research purposes, as it provides a wealth of information. But as leisure reading, it can be a bit of a slow go. The reader may find themselves getting bogged down in the minutiae and losing interest. Nevertheless, for those who are truly interested in the subject and are willing to put in the effort, this biography offers a fascinating and detailed look into a life well-lived.

**After p. 250**
I'm engaged in an experiment, reading Robin-Laurant's and Parker's biographies of Melville simultaneously. I've completed about a third of RL's bio, which brings Melville up to the publication of Mardi, a novel that must be quite peculiar. But never mind that for now. I've now read around 250 pages of Parker's biography, which he claims derives entirely from the "Melville Log." I'm not entirely certain what that is, but my impression is that it's a database of every document and printed source even remotely related to the life and work of Herman Melville. Parker seems to have dedicated much of his career to maintaining and enhancing this database, having assumed responsibility from his predecessor. So, to be honest, my expectations of his biography weren't overly high.
What I expected was a biographical narrative that read like a sequence of notecards held together by a very thin connective tissue of prose – transition statements and paragraphs that linked one notecard to the next.
However, I'm entirely disappointed in that expectation. Parker writes quite gracefully. His prose is clear and uncluttered. His pacing is effective. And so on. There is an abundance of detail. After all, as Henry James reminds us, the biographer's business is evocative detail, and I don't find much of it annoying. As a counter-example, Parker provides the entire list of crew members on board ship during HM's first and only whaling voyage, complete with their ages, places of birth, height (in fractions of inches), skin tone, and more. For all 30 or 35 of them, and he even informs us of each one's inclination to abuse one substance or another. That seems a bit excessive. I can't imagine why he devoted hundreds of words to such material, but of course, I'm under no obligation to read it. The turning of pages is my prerogative.
Parker's characterizations of persons are well drawn, and they effectively convey Melville's personality and peculiarities, as well as those of the principal actors in HM's life. His renderings are remarkably similar to Robin-Laurant's. I'm wondering if she had access to the same "log," but the notes aren't particularly clear in either volume. It's odd and gives me pause, but I don't plan to expend much energy in pursuing answers to that question.

**After p. 400**
It seems clear that RL's biography and Parker's biography aren't directly comparable. RL focuses on Herman M. with characterizations of ancillary figures (mother, father, uncles, the usual suspects). Parker should have entitled his book "The Melville Family: A Collective Biography," much in the style (but much more voluminous) than Matheissen's "The James Family." At this point, I would say that Parker's account of Herman's adventures occupies perhaps one quarter to one third of the pages I've read.
Not that I object, of course, because I very much enjoy Parker's work, now that I've decided to skip over pages such as those that give lists of names of ships' crews and lists of persons who recommended Herman's brother for a job in the Polk administration. Parker's characterizations and portraits of HM and all his connections are wonderfully clear and the product of a sharply perceptive mind and thoughtful interpretation.
With biographies of this scope, of which there aren't many, by persons who have devoted much of their lives to their subjects, of whom there aren't many, I often wonder when I read page after page, all of which is plausible and seamless – written as if there were no gap in the evidentiary record whatever – exactly how much of the narrative derives directly from the record and how much derives from their author's thoughts about the content of the record. I wonder particularly about "interpolation," as it were, plausible and reasonable inference from evidence to fill gaps in the record, to be sure, but matters of interpretation rather than evidence, which the author normally doesn't identify in his notes. It's quite as if his thoughts must represent fact by virtue of being his thoughts. But in this case, because I don't intend to immerse myself in the Melville Log, I'll not even begin to investigate that question.
So far, I would say that I would recommend RL's biography rather than Parker's for those who want to devote time and energy to only one biography rather than any and all accounts of HM's life.

**After p. 600**
At this point, I'm thinking that Parker should have given his biography the title: "The Melvilles and Their World: A Family Biography." I have to believe that Parker never encountered the least little detail regarding any of their comings, goings, and doings, their relations, connections, and nodding acquaintances out to the sixth degree of separation, and all their comings, goings, and doings, that he didn't revere and hadn't ingested into his hoard, the inimitable Melville Log. [What could that hoard hold now that 20 years have passed since Parker published vol. 1 of his biography?] So if you're curious to know exactly who attended HM's marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, and the names of those whom the Shaws invited to remain for the wedding lunch, look no farther than Chapter 27.
But, by example, Parker does raise the perfectly legitimate question of the boundaries of the life of an individual – where does biography begin and end? Some of us tend to think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, with "strong boundaries," as the self-help gurus of the 1980s preached. Parker would respond – no such person ever lived or could live in this world. Nonetheless, after granting all that, I'm still thinking that the insights of the pop-psychologist/therapist might serve more appropriately as the foundation of the biographer's practice than Parker's premise.
One note: Parker provides a wonderfully detailed (of course), precise, and vivid mini-biography of HM's older brother, Gansevoort Melville, who deserves a biography of his own, devoted entirely to his life as first-born, eldest son, head-of-household following his father's death, autodidact, minor politician aligned with Tammany Hall in its early days, political journalist, and apparently extraordinarily eloquent and effective stump orator. I'd say that Parker devotes at least one-quarter of his first 500 pages to Gansevoort, but I have to believe that had he mined other archives, he could have dredged up much more material. Then again, he might already have read every extant page of any relevance whatsoever.

**At End**
I've finished Volume 1. Now on to Volume 2.
I have adjusted to Parker's project (of some 40 years) and am accepting of it. The product of his life's work is an extraordinarily fine work of biography – the biography of a family and its world.
I do have one objection – and that relates to the abuse of plausibility in biography. I'll illustrate by example.
The last line of volume one reads: "Taken all in all, this was the happiest day in Herman Melville's life." Parker is referring to the dinner to which he had invited his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne on the day Melville's copies of Moby-Dick arrived in Pittsfield. During that dinner, when the two of them dined alone, Melville presented the first copy of his book, which he had dedicated to NH. Apparently, the two talked for hours – well after all other guests had departed the hotel's dining room. Hawthorne, whose opinion of his work mattered more to HM than the opinion of any other human, held MD in very high esteem, and his achievement in MD above all of Melville's other five books that preceded it, and said so apparently – although neither Hawthorne nor Melville nor any eavesdropper left a memoir of their conversation that is known.
And it is entirely plausible that this dinner afforded a peak experience for Melville. I wouldn't quibble with that conclusion. But there is absolutely no foundation in evidence for Parker's final sentence. Had Melville committed that assessment to paper later in life, Parker would have found it.
I understand and I can accept a writer's need for a powerful conclusion to a work of some 850 pages, especially if that writer hoped that his readers would open volume two – longer by 100 pages than the first. That does not justify a biographer's substitution of the plausible for the factual – nor the biographer's substitution of his own response – or imagined response – to a similar circumstance for his subject's experience – which in this case will ever remain unknowable with the certainty that Parker expresses in his last sentence.
I can understand that after 40 years' intense research and writing on Melville, Parker may well have appropriated Melville entirely as his own, or, conversely, transported himself into an existence that Parker constructed in his imagination and identified with Melville's life in the past. But let us be clear. Melville was not and could never have been an extension of Parker's mind and will. And because Melville died some 70 years before Parker completed his dissertation of Melville's politics, Parker could not possibly have been Melville. Biographers sometimes forget these distinctions, unless they believe in transmigration of souls or reincarnation without announcing the fact.
But it is also true that Parker rarely departs from his evidence. When he does, however, it annoys – for a moment.
Then again, Parker has taught me that I am completely at liberty to turn pages without so much as a second glance at the words printed on them.

The moment when it becomes clear that Parker is completely the wrong person for this job arrives rather late in this volume. Up until then, one is at least willing to tolerate his longueurs. That moment is the realization that the strongest words Parker uses for any of Melville's individual works are for "White-Jacket," a dull exercise in populism that was a stepping stone to "Moby-Dick," which he vigorously defends as being critically mistreated (including by Melville himself). Parker hardly looks at the works themselves and says little that isn't obvious or a factual statement about sources or references. He seems reluctant to write about the reasons why Melville is worthy of such a long biography.
The decades spent working on "The Melville Log" have clearly driven Parker crazy, or at least impaired his judgment. In that presumably monstrous compilation, every single piece of information about anyone even tangentially related to Melville is considered relevant. This is fine in that context due to the nature of the work, but here it is only infuriating. I am clearly okay with reading a 1700-page biography of Melville since I have embarked on it, but such huge portions of this book are not even about Melville. I spent an astonishing amount of time blankly passing my eyes over stretches of pages about inconsequential things and events. The two tasks of a biographer are to research their subject and then put that research to use. Parker is clearly excellent at the first but stunningly incompetent at the second. Perhaps he is trying to justify his lifelong dedication to this task by presenting as much of his work to the reader (this is the kind of interpretive leap of reasoning that Parker often makes), but the biographer should compile the scattered information of a life into a form that others can use. The biographer undertakes the work so that the rest of us can taste the fruits, only the essentials rather than the trees, roots, fertilizer, bees, and pesticides used in the production of the fruits.
At first, I appreciated the depth of effort in presenting the Melville family history and the later repercussions for Herman. But Parker includes far too much, accumulating useless information about long-past and entirely futile political events and family dramas where a at least briefer summary would have been much better. Despite the long introductory section on the extensive family history that branches out ever more as it gets closer to Herman himself, Parker doesn't actually say anything about all the drama of this or the possible effects on Herman's thinking and work, which is an odd omission considering his willingness to sometimes assert the motivations of his subjects.
The mind boggles at how Parker thought any of this could hold any interest. There is a constant stream of excessive biographical details about practically anyone who even remotely touches on Melville's life, while leaving some historical events that would have provided a little context completely unexplained (which is a hindrance to an Englishman like me, although it's possible that many American readers wouldn't recognize these events either).
The problem with all this boredom is that this is still the most comprehensive biography of Melville when it actually focuses on him. And when Parker does indeed zero in on his ostensible subject and discards the just drainingly boring 19th-century social antics of his contemporaries, it almost becomes thrilling once Melville becomes a great writer and engages in a mental battle. But Parker neglects Melville at some points in a completely puzzling way. The few weeks in Polynesia that became "Typee" are passed over in a few sentences, but pages and pages are dedicated to his family's daily lives. When the whole reason Herman is so exciting as a writer is that he escaped the deathly dull strictures of his century in which everyone else he knew was trapped, and this carries over to his life.
A common problem with biographers is getting too close to their subjects and allowing their devotion to justify their failings, however incontestable (salient examples are Pound and Lovecraft, whose biographers are rabid in their blind defense of these figures they've dedicated so much to, leading to idiocies like spending hundreds of pages acclaiming Pound's genius in every field and then claiming that the fascists fooled him into supporting them, or that a man whose entire corpus is an allegory for the evils of racial integration wasn't a racist). The problem with Parker is that he isn't close enough to Melville. He hasn't been blinded by the light to the exclusion of all else, a light that was visible at times here but largely obscured by the just incessant and smothering amount of information about people who are completely inconsequential here.
Parker also seems comfortable making stretches of interpretation about thoughts and feelings, which is a bad trait in a biographer (and especially unnecessary here where there is already so much that detracts from the book). He refers back to past events that he believes will have affected feelings, including, for example, the almost constant mention of Gansevoort's memory. This means that even after he dies, Parker doesn't stop devoting pages and pages to him, which is draining because of how boring Gansevoort was, a minor political figure in long-past intrigues whose major players have even passed into obscurity.
The mention of Gansevoort brings up another issue, that of Parker's large cast of constantly present relatives, no matter how distant in blood or geography, drawing from such a small pool of names and living in places named from this pool too. Even if the names had been unique and noteworthy, I wouldn't have cared enough to keep track of the web of relations, and this certainly didn't help.
Parker was seemingly sometimes as bored as I was, as there are repetitions scattered throughout where he goes over the same information (which shocked me with its dullness the first time around) as if, despite his many years of work, he was still rushed to the finish and not engaged enough with what he was writing to keep track of it.
What is needed is someone with some sense to come along, who has no connection to "The Melville Log," and gut Parker's biography, extracting the information actually about Melville and actually writing something about his books (one could read this biography and hardly have any impression of why Melville was so important that he deserved this project, so little does Parker touch on his work). Someone who will leave Melville's light undimmed and be carried away intoxicated by his endeavor (how could a biographer of the man who wrote "Mardi" not descend into ecstatic thrills while describing the writing of that vast and tumultuous masterpiece?) and will write something worthy of this great man and not exemplary of the kind of empty and lifeless academicism that Melville so skillfully parodies in "Moby-Dick."

Loving Herman Melville as I do, I found certain parts of this enormous biography to be simply sublime. I was able to persevere through the excruciatingly long sections.

Among the sublime moments was an anecdote about a hike in the Berkshires with the company including Nathaniel Hawthorne. A sudden downpour forced the group to seek shelter, and there Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes delighted everyone by producing a cold bottle of champagne from his doctor's bag, along with a single silver cup for all to share.

This story was a welcome relief after the first few chapters of the book that were so soporific. We are repeatedly told that Melville's mother Maria was extremely short of money and had to sell important furniture from her house, leave New York and move upstate, evade creditors, and so on.

The political aspects related to Melville's older brother Gansevoort were marginally more interesting as G was a renowned orator in his time. I suppose it's good to be able to distinguish between James K. Polk and Andrew Jackson at the age of forty. But truly, I was intrigued by the description of an amazing banner that the ladies of Nashville made for G with an eagle on it.

Anyway, as you can see, this biography strays off-topic quite a bit. However, at the end of the day, any book that brings me closer to one of my literary favorites is a good book. Melville has a way of making it seem like he's saying 'hey, what's up Ann?' in every book. His ability to connect across the ages and engage with the reader is his most charming trait, and I can see how his approachability was influenced by his adventures and also by his many 'failures', which really just make his contemporaries appear narrow-minded. He persisted though, never giving up, thank God. But the failures are still so tragic, and that's why I don't think I'll be able to take on Volume II.

I haven't entirely finished Parker's biography of Melville.

The main reason for this is that I was extremely disappointed with his so-called 'Kraken' edition of Melville's 'Pierre, or the Ambiguities', which I was reading simultaneously.

In this edition, he essentially cuts out all the parts of the book that give it the essence of a Romantic novel. It's truly a pity as those elements are what make the novel so unique and captivating.

However, there was one aspect that I did enjoy reading about. That was Melville's family history in relation to his writing.

Learning about how his family background influenced his creative process and the themes he explored in his works was quite fascinating.

It provided valuable insights into the man behind the masterpieces and added another layer of depth to my understanding of Melville's literary achievements.

Despite the disappointment with the 'Kraken' edition, I still hope to gain more from reading the remainder of Parker's biography.

This is an exhaustive and extensive work. However, the insights it presents seem to pertain more to Melville's family rather than Melville himself. I had the opportunity to visit Arrowhead, which was Melville's home.

While there, I engaged in a conversation with the guides about my impression of this work. Interestingly, they concurred with my assessment.

It makes one wonder if perhaps the focus on the family detracts from a more in-depth understanding of Melville's own thoughts and perspectives.

Nonetheless, the work still holds value in providing a certain context and backdrop to Melville's life and times.

Perhaps further exploration and analysis are needed to tease out the true essence of Melville's genius that may be hidden within the pages of this exhaustive and extensive work.

This biography of the author of Moby Dick has many appealing aspects.

Once past Melville's childhood and youth, with his father's financial struggles and early death that precluded Herman from a formal education, the book becomes more captivating.

However, keeping track of his numerous siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins can be tiresome.

And for those seeking precise truth, there may be disappointment as author Parker uses phrases like "may have been," "could have walked," etc. when unsure of the facts.

Might he have omitted such information if he wasn't certain?

The chapters on Melville's works, including his research, drafting (with his sister as copyist), and the process of getting published, are completely engrossing.

As a young man, Melville spent over a year in the South Pacific, which provided material for his first three books.

It's hard to believe that the American press questioned the authenticity of his work.

The British press was kinder, but he still had to struggle to satisfy them all.

Thankfully, he received enough positive attention to continue writing.

It's important to note that Melville, like his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, didn't make much money in his lifetime.

He was constantly begging, borrowing, or dealing to support his family.

Wouldn't it be great if he could have lived to see his place in literary history or reap the financial rewards of his brilliant work!

Although Moby Dick sold only 3,000 copies in his lifetime, it's the novel for which he is most remembered.

Parker waxes romantic about Melville here, and rightfully so.

The volume concludes with an extended scene where Melville presents a copy of Moby Dick to Hawthorne, dedicated to his dear friend and mentor.

"Take it all in all, this was the happiest day of Melville's life."

I plan to read Volume II, but I may wait a while!

Yes, it is true that most people would not have sufficient interest or patience to read through all of this content.

Even for those individuals who truly care about the subject matter, there is a significant amount of material that can be easily skipped without losing the overall essence.

However, it is important to note that this is intentional. The intention is to make the article comprehensive, covering all aspects and details related to the topic.

And indeed, it very much achieves this goal. It provides a wealth of information that can be valuable for those who are willing to invest the time and effort to explore it fully.

So, while it may seem overwhelming at first glance, it is designed to be a comprehensive resource for those who seek in-depth knowledge.