"The Letters by and to Melville in this Correspondence volume span the greater part of his lifetime, extending from letters he wrote at the age of nine in 1828 to ones he sent and received during the year before his death at seventy-two in 1891." "The best of his own letters, some of them now anthology classics, are brilliantly revealing. These reflect the meteoric rise and excitement of his early literary career, from 1846 to 1851, as well as its equally precipitous subsequent fall; and the fullest and boldest of them, those to Evert A. Duyckinck, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and especially Nathaniel Hawthorne, were written at the pinnacle of that brief career. Yet Melville's letters through the years, even with their sporadic flashings-forth, were mostly occasional, businesslike, and never gossipy, expansive, or voluminous. The paucity of his actual as well as of his preserved correspondence contrasts surprisingly with the gregarious rush of to-and-fro epistolary traffic engaged in by his American literary contemporaries, to say nothing of the great English and Continental men and women of letters in his time." "Presented here is one sequence are the 313 texts, newly edited by Lynn Horth, that are known to survive of letters by Melville, and for the first time, in a separate sequence, the 88 texts that are known to survive of letters to him. Taken together, however, these surviving texts provide only a spotty chronicle of Melville's outer, and intermittent revelations of his inner, life. They provide so little not only because by all indications he wrote relatively few, and mostly sparse, letters but also because so many of those he did write, and receive, have been lost or destroyed. He himself, as he declared, habitually destroyed letters he received, including those he had prized from Hawthorne; and his daughter or some other too-proper descendant in the twentieth century lamentably destroyed his numerous letters to his wife." "Consequently, to fill the gaps within the correspondence, 542 editorial entries are chronologically interspersed for letters both by and to Melville for which no full text has been located but for which some evidence survives. These entries, like the editorial headnotes for the known letters, flesh out the specific historical and biographical contexts for the unlocated letters. Both supply Horth's full annotations, placing circumstances, persons, and allusions, from a wide range of documentary and scholarly sources, and drawing upon family archives of both Melville and his wife, including the recently recovered portion, now in the New York Public Library, of a trove preserved by his sister Augusta." "The aim of this edition, volume fourteen in the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, is to present a text as close to the author's intention at the time of inscription as his difficult handwriting or other surviving evidence permits. On this basis, the texts earlier presented in The Letters of Herman Melville (1960), edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, have been revised, with differences in almost every letter in spelling and punctuation, and some forty-five differences in wording. Fifty-two newly discovered letters by Melville, more than half of which are first published here, are added to those printed in the 1960 edition. This text of Correspondence is an Approved Text of the Committee on Scholarly Editions (Modern Language Association of America)."--BOOK JACKET.