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Article: New books.(five books about author Herman Melville)
- Article from:
- Harper's Magazine
- Article date:
- June 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Harper's Magazine Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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On Broadway in the mid-1840s a messenger boy could have seen Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville--American literature on the hoof, in its great flowering after Cooper and Irving. Mark Twain was Sam Clemens, barefoot and age ten in Hannibal, Missouri. Emily Dickinson was a teenager in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hawthorne was a customhouse official in Salem. Thoreau was in his cabin at Walden Pond, on land owned by Emerson, for whom he occasionally chopped firewood.
In 1846, Melville published his first book (of sixteen written, twelve were published by commercial houses, with diminishing success over the years; two were privately printed in runs of ...