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Herman Melville's Whaling Years
Written by Wilson Heflin
Edited by Mary K Bercaw and Thomas Farel Heffernan
A BOON FOR
MELVILLE SCHOLARSHIP
Melville expert Wilson Heflin spent more than fifty years researching one of the most stimulating and important periods in the great author’s life—the four years he spent aboard whaling vessels in the Pacific during the early 1840s. While doing research for his dissertation on Nantucket in 1947, Heflin discovered an abstract log of Herman Melville’s maiden voyage on the “Acushnet”. Prior to this discovery, virtually nothing factual was known of Melville’s whaling career in the South Seas. Biographers had been relying almost exclusively upon the fictional accounts contained in his first three novels. This discovery developed into a life-long search for every detail of Melville’s whaling years- detective work and scholarship at its best. Among the research, Heflin studied the log books of every ship that was at sea in the Pacific at the time of Melville’s voyages.
Heflin died in 1985 with no book to show for the many decades of study. However, two renowned Melville scholars, both familiar names to us, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Thomas Farel Heffernan, have taken the great scholar’s work and brought it into book form with their scrupulous and experienced editing. The result is Herman Melville’s Whaling Years hot off the presses at Vanderbilt University ($45.00 clothbound).
The contribution of this work to Melville scholarship is incalculable, being the most in-depth account ever published of Melville’s years aboard whaleships and how those singular experiences influenced his writing.
Congratulations all around.
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Previous Featured Books
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Scallop Season
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Whaling Years
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Summer People
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Nantucket
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Nantucket Calendar
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Mutiny on the Globe
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Nantucket Voices
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Sea Captain's Houses
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Sea of Glory
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