Herman Melville Mariner and Mystic : Raymond Weaver [ Signed , First Edition ]

Description

Signed first edition of the scarce pioneering biography Herman Melville : Mariner and Mystic by Raymond Weaver

 

Weaver, Raymond. Herman Melville Mariner and Mystic. George H Doran : New York. 1921. First edition , signed.

 

Raymond Weaver wrote this massively influential biography Herman Melville : Mariner and Mystic in 1921 during the “dark period” of the American author’s scholarship and in the process almost single-handedly ended it.

The career of Herman Melville (1819 – 1891), first as a merchant sailor and whaler, then as an author, and finally as a customs agent in New York city was one of the most overlooked in American literature until Raymond Weaver helped lead the 20th century reconsideration of his work.

Despite not enjoying Melville’s work on first encounter with Typee, Weaver began reading and researching Melville as a graduate student at Columbia before being given the unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd in 1918 by Melville’s granddaughter and bringing it to publication in 1924.

Although Weaver’s appreciation for Melville was ahead of its time and his impact on the author’s legacy is undeniable, critics suggest that the version of Melville Weaver puts forth is something of his own creation. For example, although Melville did broadly abandon prose following the failure of Moby Dick to find an audience, he did remain an active writer of poetry for decades. Weaver ignores this aspect of his hero’s life to better portray him as a misunderstood genius out of sync with the world around him driven from his art.

Whatever criticisms can be lodged against Weaver’s treatment of Melville in the text, this copy includes several of Weaver’s handmade corrections in pen along with his signature. Among the more interesting is the correction of British Melville scholar Viola Meynell’s name (printed as “Violet” in the bibliography) as the editor for the 1920 London edition of Moby Dick. Meynell’s own influence in the Anglosphere’s opinion of both the novel and Melville cannot be overstated as it was her advocacy and publication marked the addition of Moby Dick to the English canon in the Oxford World Classics series.

 

399pp, blue cloth boards, title and author gilt with decorative title panel to front. Small stain front board. Gilt spine soiled and faded, ends rubbed. Corners bumped. Some toning and foxing to pastedowns and endpapers. Contemporary ownership signature “Mabel Sheil”[?, blue pen, on half-title. Partial chip tear top margin frontis piece. Some warping and staining to plate backs. Author’s hand corrections to pages 371-72, 386-387. Pages 397 – 398 uncut. Good condition.

 

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