THE FIRST two volumes in Northwestern University—Newberry Library edition of Melville’s writings are in print (as of early 1969) and are admirably designed and edited. This edition when complete will offer students a wholly reliable series of texts and text histories. Meanwhile the Constable “Standard Edition” in sixteen volumes (London, 1922-24; reprinted New York; Russell and Russell, 1963) remains serviceable. In the case of Billy Budd, however, the text edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (1962) supersedes all previous printings. Paperback editions of Melville’s book-length narratives have multiplied in recent years, especially of Moby-Dick; many contain useful introductions and bibliographies. The Complete Stories of Herman Melville, ed. Jay Leyda (1949), falls somewhat short of what its title claims, but the texts are sound and the introduction and “notes on sources &c.” supply much valuable information.
Leon Howard’s biography, Herman Melville (1951), and Newton Arvin’s Melville (1950: American Men of Letters Series) are standard, though Arvin is puzzlingly dismissive of the work of the 1853-56 period. Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 2v. (1951), is a storehouse of essential data; Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (1953), is a shorter work in the same mode. Brief introductory studies have been published by Jean-Jacques Mayoux (1958), A. R. Humphreys (1962), and D. E. S. Maxwell (1968).
The quantity of biographical, critical, and interpretive writing on Melville that is of genuine value has become immense, and there is no particular sign of a tapering off. In fact a new round of revaluations seems to have begun. The Melville entries in the bibliographical volume of Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller and others (3rd edition revised, 1963), and in Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Jay B. Hubbell and others (1963), provide comprehensive listings of both general assessments and studies of individual works. The critical bibliography in James E. Miller, A Reader’s Guide to Herman Melville (1962), contains helpful brief descriptions of standard secondary works. The annual PMLA bibliography may be consulted for the period since 1962. William T. Stafford, ed., Melville’s Billy Budd and the Critics (1961), and John P. Runden, ed., Melville’s Benito Cereno (1965), present the critical debates over these controversial tales. Hershel Parker, ed., The Recognition of Herman Melville (1967), samples Melville criticism in general from 1846 to 1966. The response to Melville by certain European writers of this century (Lawrence, Forster, Gide, Unamuno, Jean Giono, Camus, Cesare Pavese, Eugenio Montale) has been extraordinary but is not very well represented in current collections of criticism.