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Biography is accretion, where one detail builds gradually upon another creating over time a complex portrait. Mr. Parker has spent a lifetime in archives in New York City, London, and virtually everywhere else Melville traveled, resided, or worked uncovering all sorts of fresh material. He has tried, for instance, to find every book, magazine, or newspaper Melville ever read. Even Mr. Parker marvels at the single-mindedness with which he has pursued his subject "more than half a century for a biography of only one writer!" he exclaims in his fascinating new account of his career and his craft. [This, Parker points out, is a private joke of Rollyson's. Never having met Rollyson, Parker in his Preface contrasted his meager output with Rollyson's long string of biographies.] Mr. Parker is one of the class of scholar-adventurers that originated in the 18th century, with James Boswell scooping up every scrap of Dr. Johnson's words and exploring every relationship that made the slightest difference in the Great Cham's life. . . . The best biographers aren't your stay-at-home types. They are scholars on wheels on foot, on skis doing whatever it takes to get the story. In the episodic chapters of "Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative" (a play off the subtitle of "Billy Budd"), Mr. Parker sets out to explain and justify his work as researcher and biographer. He writes about theories of biography, the importance of textual fidelity and the travails of archival work. Anyone who wants to learn how to write a multi-volume life of a writer could start here. But Mr. Parker also believes that critics representing two mighty forces (academia and the New York intellectual world) are bent on destroying the kind of scholarship that he has practiced his whole career. "Despite its immense popularity, literary biography is under attack from subversive interlopers," he writes, and ticks off a literary enemies list of academic critics, mainstream book reviewers and "interpretive" biographers who scorn careful research while favoring their own pet theories and interpretations. In "Melville Biography," he wants to turn the tables on "agenda-driven reviewers" and "recidivist critics" who have written negatively about his own books or who, he believes, have recklessly distorted Melville's life and work. Unusually, he names names critics like Edmund Wilson, James Wood and Andrew Delbanco and many other prominent intellectuals come in for rough treatment. . . . The Melville of theorists and literary critics, Mr. Parker suggests, is an "amputated manikin," "a condensed version" primarily a high-minded writer of literary prose, and not the workaday writer whom Mr. Parker presents. . . . Mr. Parker's greatest enmity is reserved for Andrew Delbanco, professor of American studies at Columbia University, who the biographer believes has deliberately tried to discredit him. Mr. Delbanco dismissed the first volume of "Herman Melville" in the New York Review of Books in 1997. He not only disparaged the new data that Mr. Parker contributed to Melville biography but also suggested that Mr. Parker invented details to suit his all-consuming quest to tell his subject's story, a nearly mortal blow to a biographer who has spent his entire career documenting every aspect of his subject's life. Mr. Parker quotes Mr. Delbanco questioning the former's characterization of Melville as "the first American author to become a sex symbol" and dismissing the evidence as merely a phrase taken from "one woman's fan letter." In fact, Mr. Parker says, he was relying on what he calls "many diverse pieces of evidence," including the responses of numerous men in contemporary reviews and newspaper notices who found Typee titillating because it described the sailor-narrator's romps with native women on a South Seas island. Mr. Parker cites one newspaper that greeted Mr. Melville's engagement announcement with the quip that the "fair forsaken Fayaway [the novel's South Seas heroine]" should sue for "breach of promise." Mr. Parker emphasizes that he was describing reactions to Melville's writing, not the behavior of the man: Mr. Delbanco's claim that the biographer portrays a strutting, "randy young man" attributes a vulgar idea to Mr. Parker that is nowhere in his text. The point of this particular disagreement becomes clear when Mr. Parker notes that, in Melville: His World and Work (2005), Mr. Delbanco described Melville as "the randy young globe-trotter up in the attic reliving his escapades." Imagine Mr. Parker's chagrin when he saw Mr. Delbanco's words referring to the novelist as bait for the "nineteenth-century equivalent of a rock star's groupies"! He has a right to wonder: "Is there a technical term in rhetoric, poetics, or jurisprudence for what Delbanco has achieved here in the reuse of material, mine and his?" Such subtle pilfering, indeed, is all too characteristic of the high-toned critics writing for the major book-reviewing publications. They are paid to review a biography and instead raid the text in order to show off their knowledge (gained from the very book under review), adding some interpretive flourish and later republishing the agglomeration in their own books. A new biography is always welcome, but too often the popular press pays attention only to the new, and Mr. Parker clearly feels that authors who write "interpretive biographies" and lean on his scholarship are in some way passing his work off as their own. Mr. Parker has a word for the mentality of such men: archivophobic. "We have entered a period when very few academics do archival research," he writes. They hardly ever venture in the stacks and almost never explore the wider world. . . . The contemporary aversion to research is bitterly ironic because it is easier to do than ever before. The digitization of old documents and proliferation of scholarly databases has revolutionized the way scholars can pursue a paper trail, providing virtually instant access to materials from across the world. Mr. Parker himself revels in the new online world, in the new Melville facts to be gleaned from newly available newspaper archives, for instance. He takes great enjoyment in drawing a contrast between the ephemera produced by prominent dilettantes and the lasting contributions of diligent but barely known literary bloggers "divine amateurs" who have made important discoveries of Melville sources. One blogger, Nicole Perrin, even discovered, through her "marathon reading of Melville," a source for a passage in the author's book-length poem "Clarel" a source that Melville scholars had never considered. Digging in the archives, Mr. Parker believes, is the only method for turning up new discoveries about important figures like Melville. The pleasures of the text will always make an exclusive appeal to academic and literary critics who prefer their literature pure. . . . Melville Biography is a superb contribution to a fledgling field: the study of the writing of literary lives. To a young academic with even the faintest interest in biography, Mr. Parker's book may come as a revelation, as well as a horrifying insight into the way biographers and biography have been abused. It should also be a call to arms, although I doubt that in the tenure-bound, cliquish world of the academy many will follow Hershel Parker into the breach. Mr. Rollyson is the author of A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography. His most recent biography is "American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath." The article can be read here. Parker points out that on January 16 Rollyson in the blog of Biographers International Organization gave a succinct preview of the long review just quoted from: "Reading Hershel Parker's Melville biography. I don't mean his biography of Melville but his book about writing the Melville biography. He is concerned, though, with much more than Melville. He is really writing a fascinating study of biography as a genre and why it has incurred so much hostility." Parker likes this short comment very much. His book, he says, is indeed a study of biography as a genre. He confesses a fondness for his endnotes, not discussed in the Wall Street Journal review, for they constitute a seminar in which dozens of biographers, British and American, discuss problems in biography which Parker has identified in his own work on Melville biography. Parker hopes the book in the long run will be used by people interested in the genre of biography as well as by people primarily interested in Herman Melville. The first ten comments in Amazon.com, he notes, are remarkably favorable. Two signed comments are by authors of books on Sam Peckinpah--David Weddle, the writer for Battlestar Galactica and other TV series, and Paul Seydor, the editor of Tin Cup and other movies. Still despairing of academia, Parker rejoices in such readers! And he insists that Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is indeed written with "a rare combination of humor and passion," just as the New Yorker blog said. 
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