herman melville.ppt

Herman Melville
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, writer of short stories, and poet from the American Renaissance period. Best known for his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), he is also legendary for having been forgotten during the last thirty years of his life. "In Melville's manipulation of his reading," scholar Stanley T. Williams wrote, "was a transforming parable to Shakespeare's."
Brief Introduction
Life Story
Birth: New York City; August 1, 1819
Grandson of two Revolutionary War Heroes
Death of father in 1832 (12)--> (15) quit school
Various jobs: bank clerk; clerk in a cap and fur store; farmhand; schoolteacher, sailor, whaler
Clerk in New York Custom house for the last 20 years of his life
Death in 1891
1) Going out to sea
His experiences and adventures on the sea furnished him with abundant material for his fiction writings, especially his masterpiece Moby-Dick.
Three important things in his life:
2) His marriage
In the history of American literature there were two authors had similar marriages. Melville and Scott Fitzgerald, both married above them and had to do hackwork(纯粹为糊口而写的东西,庸俗作品)for the money they needed to keep their wives in their extravagant style.
3) His friendship with Hawthorne
During the summer of 1890 Melville and Hawthorne met and became good friends.
They shared similar ideas and opinions on most kinds of fields, especially against the background of Transcendental optimism.
Melville agrees with Hawthorne’s Blackness --- the evil at the core of life.
“Evil in life and the human soul help make life and man better”
“To scale great heights, we e out of the lowest depths. The way to heaven is through hell. We need fiery baptism in the fierce flame of our bosoms.”凤凰涅槃浴火重生
The original design of Moby Dick was just a text on the whale fishery.
When Melville met Hawthorne, he pleted one third of Moby Dick. Without Hawthorne, Melville would have just written it about whaling huntin