The Passages of Herman Melville Author:Jay Parini Herman Melville is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers America has ever produced. In this stirring novel Jay Parini recreates his adventurous life and tragic death in obscurity, creating a searing portrait of a man of rare psychological intensity. Opening with an aging, angry, and drunken Herman Melville wreaking domestic havoc in his... more » unhappy New York home, it takes in the full span of a life: ranging from his adventures on the South Seas - which inspired his novels Typee and Omoo, and ultimately fed into his ignored masterpiece, Moby-Dick - to trudging the docks of New York as a customs inspector. Along the way, Parini navigates the torrid personal relationships and barely suppressed desires that defined Melville's life. The story is told from the perspective of his long-suffering wife, Lizzie, and third-person accounts of Melville's crowded life: his shipping off to sea on a merchant vessel as an impoverished young aristocrat; his fateful voyage on a whaling ship; his desertion in the Marquesas Islands and sojourn with cannibals-a great adventure and polymorphous sexual idyll-and his instant fame as a novelist; his fateful encounter and charged friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne; and the long years of physical decline and literary obscurity. Jay Parini creates a Melville who is at once sympathetic and maddening, in sync with the vast forces of the universe and hopelessly impractical and abstracted. He imagines to create a novel that both echoes and pays tributes to the great works of the nineteenth century, while delivering a gripping historical drama in the process.« less