If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville
was the quintessential American. With a historian's perspective and a
critic's insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously
demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he
recorded -- in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations
with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in
Manhattan -- an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy
storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to
and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville's life
and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.