Hawthorne and His Mosses
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" is an essay and critical review by Herman Melville of the short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1846. Published pseudonymously by "a Virginian spending July in Vermont", it appeared in the New York Literary World magazine in two issues: August 17 and August 24, 1850. An early, literary expression of the mid-nineteenth century Young America movement, the work has been cited as an important commentary on, analysis of, the emerging "New American Literature." Melville met the author Nathaniel Hawthorne at a picnic and an ensuing hike up Monument Mountain in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts on August 5, 1850. Among the hikers were James Thomas Fields, Cornelius Mathews, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Melville and Hawthorne established an immediate and intense connection; as a local journalist would write: "the two were compelled to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks... Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter.
They learned so much of each other's character, found that they held so much of thought and opinion in common, that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable."Melville had been given a copy of Mosses from an Old Manse as a gift but had not read it. It is unclear if he began writing the review of the book after meeting Hawthorne, he was, however impressed by Hawthorne and, though the book had been published four years he completed his review. Another of the hikers, Evert Augustus Duyckinck, publisher of the periodical New York Literary World, offered to delay his departure for New York city until the manuscript was ready; as publisher of Hawthorne and friend of Melville, he saw its appearance in his magazine as a win-win situation. Before learning the identity of the anonymous author, Hawthorne's wife Sophia declared the essay to be written by "the first person who has in print apprehended Mr. Hawthorne." When she discovered it was Melville, she called him "an invaluable person, full of daring & questions, & with all momentous considerations afloat in the crucible of his mind."
Melville, who took time off from writing Moby-Dick to compose the review, expressed gratitude to Hawthorne for "dropping germinous seeds in my soul." Emboldened by Hawthorne's example he started to scrutinize what he had written so far and began a major expansion and revision of his work in progress and soon-to-be masterpiece. Scholar David Dowling suggests that Melville intended the essay to redefine the expectations of readers of American prose to prepare them for Moby-Dick. In reforming previous literary biases, he wanted to encourage an embracing of the dark side of writing, hoping that his own book would be received well. Delbanco, Andrew. Melville, His World and Work. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40314-0. Parker, Hershel. "36: Hawthorne and His Mosses". Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819-1851. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-5428-8. Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-8129-7291-7. "History’s Dick Jokes: On Melville and Hawthorne", by Jordan Alexander Stein, Los Angeles Review of Books, December 15, 2015 "Hawthorne and Melville", by David B.
Kesterson, Hawthorne in Salem "The Hawthorne-Melville Relationship", by John W. Stuart, Hawthorne in Salem, 2004
G. P. Putnam's Sons
G. P. Putnam's Sons is an American book publisher based in New York. Since 1996, it has been an imprint of the Penguin Group; the company began as Wiley & Putnam with the 1838 partnership between George Palmer Putnam and John Wiley, whose father had founded his own company in 1807. In 1841, Putnam went to London where he set up a branch office, the first American company to do so. In 1848, he returned to New York, where he dissolved the partnership with John Wiley and established G. Putnam Broadway, publishing a variety of works including quality illustrated books. Wiley began John Wiley, still an independent publisher to the present day. In 1853, G. P. Putnam & Co. started Putnam’s Magazine with Charles Frederick Briggs as its editor. On George Palmer Putnam’s death in 1872, his sons George H. John and Irving inherited the business and the firm's name was changed to G. P. Putnam's Sons. Son George H. Putnam became president of a position he held for the next fifty-two years. In 1874, the company established its own book printing and manufacturing office, set up by John Putnam and operating out of newly leased premises at 182 Fifth Avenue.
This printing side of the business became a separate division called the Knickerbocker Press, was relocated in 1889 to the Knickerbocker Press Building, built for the press in New Rochelle, New York. On the death of George H. Putnam in 1930, the various Putnam heirs voted to merge the firm with Minton, Balch & Co. who became the majority stockholders. George Palmer Putnam's grandson, George P. Putnam, left the firm at that time. Melville Minton, the partner and sales manager of Minton Balch & Co. became acting president and majority stockholder of the firm until his death in 1956. In 1936, Putnam acquired the publisher Coward-McCann, ran it as an imprint into the 1980s. Upon Melville Minton's death, his son Walter J. Minton took control of the company. In 1965, G. P. Putnam's Sons acquired a mass market paperback publishing house. MCA bought Putnam Publishing Group and Berkley Publishing Group in 1975. Phyllis E. Grann, running Pocket Books for Simon & Schuster was brought on board in 1976 as editor-in-chief.
Grann worked with MCA executive Stanley Newman on a financial model to make Putnam profitable. This model emphasized publishing key authors annually and took Putnam from $10 million in revenue to over $100 million by 1983. While keeping the list at 75 titles a year, Putnam focused on winners like Tom Clancy whose book Red Storm Rising sold nearly a million copies in 1986. Putnam along with other publishers in the 1980s moved to a heavy discount hardcover model to keep up with demand and sales through bookstore chains and price clubs. Phyllis Grann was promoted to CEO of Putnam in 1987 becoming the first woman to be CEO of a major publishing house. By 1993, the publisher was making $200 million in revenue. In 1982, Putnam acquired Grosset & Dunlap from Filmways. In 1982, Putnam acquired the book publishing division of Playboy Enterprises, which included Seaview Books. In the 1990s ownership of Putnam changed a number of times. MCA was bought by Matsushita Electric in 1990; the Seagram Company acquired 80% of MCA from Matsushita and shortly thereafter Seagram changed the name of the company to Universal Studios, Inc.
The new owners had no interest in publishing, but Phyllis Grann stepped in and was able to broker the deal for Putnam to be merged with Penguin Group in 1996, a division of British publishing conglomerate, Pearson PLC Putnam and the Penguin Group formed Penguin Putnam Inc. In 2001, Grann abruptly left after speculation over tensions with Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino. In 2013, Penguin merged with Bertelsmann's Random House. Books in the United States About Putnam at Penguin Group
Redburn
Redburn: His First Voyage is the fourth book by the American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1849. The book is semi-autobiographical and recounts the adventures of a refined youth among coarse and brutal sailors and the seedier areas of Liverpool. Melville wrote Redburn in less than ten weeks. While one scholar describes it as "arguably his funniest work," scholar F. O. Matthiessen calls it "the most moving of its author's books before Moby-Dick". Unable to find employment at home, young Wellingborough Redburn signs on the Highlander, a merchantman out of New York City bound for Liverpool, England. Representing himself as the "son of a gentleman" and expecting to be treated as such, he discovers that he is just a green hand, a "boy", the lowest rank on the ship, assigned all the duties no other sailor wants, like cleaning out the "pig-pen", a longboat that serves as a shipboard sty; the first mate promptly nicknames him "Buttons" for the shiny ones on his impractical jacket.
Redburn grasps the workings of social relations aboard ship. As a common seaman he can have no contact with those "behind the mast" where the officers command the ship. Before the mast, where the common seaman work and live, a bully named Jackson, the best seaman aboard, rules through fear with an iron fist. Uneducated yet cunning, with broken nose and squinting eye, he is described as "a Cain afloat, branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat near him." Redburn soon experiences all the trials of a greenhorn: seasickness, scrubbing decks, climbing masts in the dead of night to unfurl sails, cramped quarters, bad food. When the ship lands in Liverpool he is given liberty ashore, he walks the city every day. One day in a street called Launcelott's Hey he hears "a feeble wail" from a cellar beneath an old warehouse and looking into it sees "the figure of what had been a woman, her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children, that leaned toward her, one on each side.
At first I knew not whether they were dead. They made no sign, he runs for help but is met with indifference by a ragpicker, a porter, his landlady by a policeman who tells him to mind his own business. He returns with some bread and cheese and drops them into the vault to the mother and children, but they are too weak to lift it to their mouths; the mother whispers "water" so he fills his tarpaulin hat at an open hydrant. The girls revive enough to nibble some cheese, he clasps the mother's arms and pulls them aside to see "a meager babe, the lower part of its body thrust into an old bonnet. Its face was dazzlingly white in its squalor, it must have been dead for some hours." Judging them beyond the point at which medicine could help, he returns to his room. A few days he revisits the street and finds the vault empty: "In place of the woman and children, a heap of quick-lime was glistening." On the docks he meets Harry Bolton, a dandy who claims to be a sailor looking for a job, Redburn helps him procure a berth on the Highlander for the return voyage.
They become fast friends and make a trip to London where they visit a luxurious private club, Aladdin's Palace, with an exotic environment Redburn struggles to make sense of, concluding it must be a gambling house. The ship soon departs for Bolton's deficits as sailor become apparent. Redburn suspects that Bolton has never been to sea before and Bolton is tormented by the crew. Jackson, after being ill in bed for four weeks, returns to active duty: he climbs to the topsail yard suddenly vomits "a torrent of blood from his lungs", falls headfirst into the sea and disappears; the crew never speak his name again. Reaching port, Redburn heads for his Bolton signs on a whaler. Redburn hears that Bolton, far out in the Pacific, fell over the side and drowned. Wellingborough Redburn Redburn's elder brother Mr. Jones Captain Riga The Highlander Crew The suicidal sailor Jackson Max the Dutchman The Greenlander Mr Thompson, the cook, the Doctor Lavender Jack Blunt Larry Gun-Deck The Liverpool Docks Danby Mary, Danby's wife Bob Still, Danby's old crony Townspeople, other foreign sailors, the poor, the beggars, the depraved Harry Bolton Miguel Saveda Carlo The O'Briens and the O'Regans Goodwell Melville alluded to Redburn for the first time in a letter to his English publisher in the late spring of 1849, in which he wrote that the novel would be practical rather than follow the "unwise" course of his previous novel, harshly criticized: I have now in preparation a thing of a different cast from "Mardi":—a plain, amusing narrative of personal experience—the son of a gentleman on his first voyage to sea as a sailor—no metaphysics, no conic-sections, nothing but cakes & ale.
I have shifted my ground from the South Seas to a different quarter of the globe—nearer home—and what I write I have wholly picked up by my own observations under comical circumstances. Melville adopted this more commercial approach to writing as his family obligations increased and his working conditions became more difficult. Living with him in the small house in New York City were his wife, mother and his brother Allen with his wife and child. Melville portrayed himself at this time as being forced to write "with duns all around him, & looking over the back of his chair—& perching on his pen & diving in his inkstand—like the devils about St. Anthony."The book is a fictional narrative based loosely on Melville's own first voyage to Liverpool in 1839. The manuscript
Evert Augustus Duyckinck
Evert Augustus Duyckinck was an American publisher and biographer. He was associated with the literary side of the Young America movement in New York, he was born on November 1816, in New York City to Evert Duyckinck, a publisher. Evert the younger graduated from Columbia College, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, in 1835, he studied law with John Anthon, was admitted to the bar in 1837. He spent the next year in Europe. Before he went abroad he wrote articles on the poet George Crabbe, the works of George Herbert, Oliver Goldsmith, for the New York Review. In 1840 he started a monthly magazine with Cornelius Mathews called Arcturus, which ran until 1842; the New York Tribune commented on the important partnership by referring to Duyckinck and Mathews as "the Castor and Pollux of Literature—the Gemini of the literary Zodiac". Duyckinck wrote articles on other authors while at home and in Europe. Between 1844 and 1846, Evert became the literary editor of John L. O'Sullivan's The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which moved from Washington D.
C. to New York in 1840. On April 22, 1840 in Connecticut he married Margaret Wolfe Panton, they had as their children: Evert Augustus Duyckinck II, George Duyckinck, Henry Duyckinck. All of his children died. In the years 1845-46 he edited the book series "The Library of Choice Reading" and "The Library of American Books" for the Wiley & Putnam publishing house. In 1845, he assisted Edgar Allan Poe in printing his Tales collection and selected which stories to include; the collection was a critical success. In 1847 he became the editor of The Literary World, a weekly review of books written with his brother George Long Duyckinck until 1853; the two brothers became the unofficial leaders of the New York literary scene in the 1840s into the 1850s. In 1854 the brothers were again united in the preparation of The Cyclopaedia of American Literature, he published Wisdom of Sydney Smith, with a memoir. After the death of Washington Irving, Duyckinck gathered together and published in one volume a collection of anecdotes and traits of the author, under the title of Irvingiana.
His last literary work was the preparation, with William Cullen Bryant, of an edition of William Shakespeare. He died on August 1878 in New York City, New York. On 18 February 1865, author Duyckinck sent President Abraham Lincoln a letter. Duyckinck signed the letter “Asmodeus”, with his initials below his pseudonym, his letter enclosed a newspaper clipping about an inappropriate joke told by Lincoln at the Hampton Roads Peace Conference. The purpose of Duyckinck’s letter was to advise Lincoln of “an important omission” about the history of the conference, he advised that the newspaper clipping be added to the “Archives of the Nation”. In January 1879, a meeting in his memory was held by the New York historical society, a biographical sketch of Duyckinck was read by William Allen Butler. Herman Melville, a close friend of Duyckinck's with whom he corresponded refers in his book Mardi to Duyckinck's highbrow magazine Arcturus by naming a ship in the book Arcturion. Referring to it as "exceedingly dull", the author notes the low literary level of its crew.
Duyckinck garnered a mention in James Russell Lowell's A Fable for Critics with the lines, "Good-day, Mr. Duyckinck, I am happy to meet / With a scholar so ripe and a critic so neat". Charles Frederick Briggs noted Duyckinck's ability in the "art of puffing", heavy praise for works that did not merit it. Edwin Percy Whipple chidingly called Duyckinck "the most Bostonian of New-Yorkers". William Allen Butler noted that his taste in literature was too high for most readers: "While Duyckinck was the most genial of companions, the most impartial of critics, he was too much of a recluse, buried in his books solitary in life, removed from the circle of worldly and fashionable life". Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1855. Francis L. Hawks, D. D. LL, D. Henry Theodore Tuckerman James William Beekman John Wolfe and Samuel G. Drake Wilson, J. G.. "Duyckinck, Evert Augustus". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton
Billy Budd
Billy Budd, Sailor is the final novel by American writer Herman Melville, first published posthumously in London in 1924 as edited by Raymond M. Weaver, a professor at Columbia University. Other versions were published. Melville had begun writing the original work in November 1888, but left it unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by British critics as a masterpiece when published in London, it took its place as a classic literary work in the United States; the novella was discovered in manuscript form in 1919 by Weaver, studying Melville's papers as his first biographer. Melville's widow had begun to edit the manuscript, but had not been able to decide her husband's intentions at several key points or to see his intended title. Poor transcription and misinterpretation of Melville's notes marred the first published versions of the text. After several years of study, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. published what was considered the best transcription and critical reading text in 1962.
In 2017, the Northwestern University Press published a "new reading text" based on a "corrected version" of the genetic text prepared by G. Thomas Tanselle; the novella was adapted as a stage play in 1951 by Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman and produced on Broadway, where it won the Donaldson Awards and Outer Critics Circle Awards for best play. Benjamin Britten adapted it as an opera by the same name, first performed in December 1951; the play was adapted into a film in 1962, directed, co-written, starring Peter Ustinov with Terence Stamp receiving an Academy Award nomination in his film debut. Billy Budd is a seaman impressed into service aboard HMS Bellipotent in the year 1797, when the Royal Navy was reeling from two major mutinies and was threatened by the Revolutionary French Republic's military ambitions, he is impressed to this large warship from another, merchant ship, The Rights of Man. As his former ship moves off, Budd shouts, "Good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man." Billy, a foundling from Bristol, has an innocence, good looks and a natural charisma that make him popular with the crew.
His only physical defect is a stutter. He arouses the antagonism of John Claggart. Claggart, while not unattractive, seems somehow "defective or abnormal in the constitution", possessing a "natural depravity." Envy is Claggart's explicitly stated emotion toward Budd, foremost because of his "significant personal beauty," and for his innocence and general popularity. This leads Claggart to falsely charge Billy with conspiracy to mutiny; when the captain, Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, is presented with Claggart's charges, he summons Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private meeting. Claggart makes his case and Billy, astounded, is unable to respond, due to his stutter. In his extreme frustration he strikes out at Claggart. Vere convenes a drumhead court-martial, he acts as convening authority, defense counsel and sole witness. He intervenes in the deliberations of the court-martial panel to persuade them to convict Billy, despite their and his beliefs in Billy's moral innocence. Vere claims to be following the Articles of War.
Although Vere and the other officers do not believe Claggart's charge of conspiracy and think Billy justified in his response, they find that their own opinions matter little. The martial law in effect states that during wartime the blow itself, fatal or not, is a capital crime; the court-martial convicts Billy following Vere's argument that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir more mutiny throughout the British fleet. Condemned to be hanged the morning after his attack on Claggart, Billy before his execution says, "God bless Captain Vere!" His words were repeated by the gathered crew in a "resonant and sympathetic echo."CH 26The novel closes with three chapters that present ambiguity: Chapter 28 describes the death of Captain Vere. In a naval action against the French ship, Athée, Captain Vere is mortally wounded, his last words are "Billy Budd, Billy Budd." Chapter 29 presents an extract from an official naval gazette purporting to give the facts of the fates of John Claggart and Billy Budd aboard HMS Bellipotent – but the "facts" offered turn the facts that the reader learned from the story upside down.
The gazette article described Budd as a conspiring mutineer of foreign birth and mysterious antecedents, confronted by John Claggart. The master-at-arms, loyally enforcing the law, is fatally stabbed by Budd; the gazette concludes that the crime and weapon used suggest a foreign birth and subversive character. Chapter 30 reprints a cheaply printed ballad written by one of Billy's shipmates as an elegy; the adult, experienced man represented in the poem is not the innocent youth portrayed in the preceding chapters. Created over the last five years of his life, the novella Billy Budd represents Melville's return to prose fiction after three decades when he wrote only poetry, he started it as a poem, a ballad entitled "Billy in the Darbies", which he intended to include in his book, John Marr and Other Sailors. Melville composed a short, prose head-note to set the scene; the character of "Billy" in this early version was an older man condemned for inciting mutiny and guilty as charged. He did not include t
Tai Pī (province)
Tai Pī is a province of Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas Islands, an administrative subdivision of French Polynesia. The settlement follows the line of the valley and the stream that passes from its mountainous island surroundings. Herman Melville was famously marooned here when, as a young whaling ship sailor, he deserted ship with his shipmate, Toby Greene; this experience which lasted a total of four weeks was the subject of Herman Melville's first book Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. He arrived the day the French sailed into Nuku Hiva and began firing their cannon, thus proclaiming it a French Protectorate. Melville's story thus represents the tribe's native way of life before their island's opening-up to the outside world and the suppression that would follow, their lifestyle, surroundings & condition made the young Melville think he had stumbled into the Garden of Eden. He portrays their daily life as joyful and innocent, strikingly free of the worries of the Western World. Man makes a living by foraging in the abundant tropical surroundings, teaches his son himself, within the community.
There is no difference between the possessions of the islanders, their homes are erected by everybody and not fixed-abodes. This way of life was to decline and change with the arrival of the Europeans, as explored in Melville's second book, Omoo. During the wars between the Te I'i and the Tai Pī in 1813, the American navy Captain David Porter arrived in the frigate USS Essex and ten other armed ships on October 25. A shore party was landed and they claimed the island for the United States and constructed a small village, named Madisonville. A fort and a dock was built, the latter to refit the Essex. Porter became involved in the tribal conflict; the first expedition into the jungle was led by Lieutenant John Downes, He and forty others captured a fort held by 3,000 to 4,000 Happah warriors with the assistance of several hundred Te I'is. The victory forced the Happah to terms and they allied themselves with both the Americans and the Te I'i. A second expedition was led by Porter himself and he made an amphibious assault against the Tai Pī held coastline.
5,000 Te I'is and Happahs accompanied the fleet in at least 200 war-canoes. Though the landing was unopposed, Porter's force of thirty men and a cannon led the march inland where they found another, more formidable, enemy fort. Thousands of natives armed with rocks and spears, positioned in a formidable mountain fortress, were able to fend off their enemies; the victory was short-lived however and Captain Porter followed up his landing with an expedition overland, bypassing the fort, to threaten the Tai Pī's village center in Typee Valley as the Americans named it. When the column arrived at their destination it was November 30 of 1813; the first shots fired occurred after the Tai Pī's attempted to ambush the column, the attack was beaten off and the Porter issued a messing warning that if the Tai Pī did not cease their resistance at once, he would destroy the villages. After a little while of waiting, the hostiles seemed to ignore the demands so the expedition advanced. An engagement ensued.
In the end, the Americans and their Te I'i and Happah allies had won at severe cost to the enemy, who sued for peace soon after. The next few months were peaceful until May 1814; the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom was in its third year most of the American fleet was captured British privateers. At least six British prisoners were at Nuku Hiva during the American operations against the natives, not including a number who volunteered to fight for Captain Porter, but in December 1813, Porter left Nuku Hiva to continue raiding British whalers. He left behind only nineteen navy sailors and six prisoners under two midshipmen and United States Marine Corps Lieutenant John M. Gamble. On May 7, 1814, a group of the British sailors mutinied, released the six prisoners and attacked the fort. Gamble was wounded in the foot and taken captive with his remaining men on the corvette Seringapatam though the Americans were set adrift that day. An Englishman, named Wilson, on the island was used as an interpreter by Porter and on May 9 he convinced the Te I'i that Porter would not return which the natives were not happy about.
Wilson persuaded the Te I'is to cancel the alliance and attack. Six American sailors were on the beach at Madisonville when the Te I'is attacked, Four of the men were killed and one other man escaped wounded with a second survivor. Gamble was alone on the Sir Andrew Hammond, one of the captured British ships. While still recovering from his wound to the foot, two Te I'i war-canoes attacked the ship; the ship's cannon were loaded so Lieutenant Gamble stumbled from one gun to another, firing them as fast as he could. Gamble beat off the enemy attack single-handedly though after the deaths of four of his men in town, there was no choice but to abandon the colony with the remaining seven, all of whom were either wounded or ill. After that the base was never again occupied by American forces. Captain Porter, who intended to sail back to Nuku Hiva, was captured at the Battle of Valparaiso on March 28. Boot, Max; the Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic Books.
ISBN 046500721X. LCCN 2004695066
Typee public domain audiobook at LibriVox
