This two-volume project constitutes the most comprehensive biography of Melville ever published. Hershel Parker reveals with extraordinary precision the twisting turns and turmoil of Melville’s life, from his Manhattan boyhood to his death. Melville lovers have known Hershel Parker as a news bringer - from the shocking false report headlined Herman Melville Crazy to the tantalizing title of Melville’s lost novel, The Isle of the Cross. Encompassing prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, these two volumes confirm Hershel Parker’s position as the world’s preeminent Melville scholar.