Hershel Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware

University of Delaware

The university is organized into seven colleges:* College of Agriculture and Natural Resources* College of Arts and Sciences* Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics* College of Earth, Ocean and Environment* College of Education and Human Development...

. He is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the landmark Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, was written by American author Herman Melville and first published in 1851. It is considered by some to be a Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod,...

(1967 and 2001) and Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

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Volume 1 of Parker's two-volume biography, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1,1819-1851, Vol.2, 1851-1891, was one of two finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Each volume of the biography won the highest award from the Association of American Publishers, the first volume in the category of “Literature and Language” (1997) and the second volume in a new category of “Biography and Autobiography” (2003), the only time anyone has won the top AAP award twice.

Others have called attention to the excellence of Parker's two-volume biography as well. On September 22, 2008 at the inaugural public program of the CUNY Leon Levy Center for Biography, "An Eloquent Beginning," one of the presenters, John T. Matteson, read aloud the first paragraph of Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851, as an example of how “the opening paragraph should reflect the character of the subject, the way the music of a great aria fits the mood of the words being sung.”

Parker is an advocate of traditional methods of literary research, which emphasize access to original materials, encourage deliberate study of chronology, and examine the relationship between a literary work and the creative genius of its author.

Early Life, Education, Career

Parker was born 26 November 1935 near Comanche, Oklahoma. After the 11th grade he became a telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern Railway (1952–1959). Leaving the railroad after graduating “with highest honors” from Lamar State College of Technology in August 1959, he held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for his M.A. at Northwestern University (1960) and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship for his Ph.D there (1963). He taught at the University of Illinois (1963–1965); Northwestern University (1965–1968); the University of Southern California (1968–1979); and the University of Delaware (1979–1998), where he was H. Fletcher Brown Professor. His awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1974–1975), the USC Associates Award for Creative Scholarship and Research (1976), and a Research Fellowship from the University of Delaware Center for Advanced Study (1981 1982).

Editorial Projects: Herman Melville

He has undertaken four long-term collaborative projects. He was Associate General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville for 13 volumes and is General Editor for the final two volumes, Published Poems (2009) and “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Uncompleted Writings (forthcoming). He edited the 1820-1865 section of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (1979 and the next four editions); much of his work remains in the sixth edition (2007), according to Norton policy. For each of the four volumes of the edition of Melville in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, edited by Philippe Jaworski (1997–2010), he contributed a “Chronologie” based on his expansion of Jay Leyda’s The New Melville Log. In the fourth collaboration, Parker contributed about half the new items in the Supplement to the 1969 edition of Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log (1951) and then after Leyda’s death in 1988 expanded the archive electronically from 1,000 pages to 9,000 pages. With the help of Robert Sandberg in layout and coding, in 2011 he is condensing 3,000 pages for the first of three 600-page print volumes of The New Melville Log.

Recovering Lost Authority in American Novels

In the 1970s Parker pioneered the study of lost authority in standard American novels by Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

, F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...

, William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...

, Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...

 and others. His work on Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...

 repeatedly evoked threats of lawsuits from Fredson Bowers

Fredson Bowers

Fredson Thayer Bowers was an American bibliographer and scholar of textual editing.-Life:Bowers was a graduate of Brown University and Harvard University...

 for exposing sloppiness in both theory and practice in the Virginia Edition. Parker’s 1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction was the first book systematically to bring biographical evidence to bear on textual theory, literary criticism, and literary theory. Frequently attacked by reviewers trained in the New Criticism as well as by proponents of the New Bibliography of W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers

Fredson Bowers

Fredson Thayer Bowers was an American bibliographer and scholar of textual editing.-Life:Bowers was a graduate of Brown University and Harvard University...

, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons has nevertheless become a classic (see Google Books) and has since the late 1980s been gratefully applied to their problems by biblical, classical, and medieval scholars as well as by critics of more modern literature. Parker has written seminal studies of Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

 and Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

 and still works occasionally in textual study and publishing history from a biographical stance. His 1981 preview of Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons was reprinted as the lead article in the 2010 Anglo-American Scholarly Editing, 1980–2005, and the Winter 2011 American Literary Realism contains his new “The Talented Ripley Hitchcock” on the editor of both Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...

 and Zane Grey

Zane Grey

Zane Grey was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the Old West. Riders of the Purple Sage was his bestselling book. In addition to the success of his printed works, they later had second lives and continuing influence...

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