Hershel Parker, the H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Delaware, will speak at Claremont McKenna College's Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Monday, March 24 at 6:45 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public; seating is available on a first-come basis. The Athenaeum is located at 384 East Eighth Street, at the intersection of Eighth and Amherst Streets in Claremont.
Parker will speak on Damned by Dollars: Moby Dick and the Price of Genius, discussing the rise and fall of Herman Melville. Although Moby Dick is considered by many a crown jewel of American literature, it met both critical and financial failure when it was published in 1851.
Considered the dean of Melville scholars and a lifelong devotee, Parker is the author of a magisterial two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography. The first volume was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1997, and the second volume, published last year, is the most recent winner of the Association of American Publishers' Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for Biography and Autobiography. In addition to the biography, Parker has worked on the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's complete works, as well as the Norton critical edition of Moby Dick and the innovative critical volume Moby Dick as Doubloon. He is also the author of Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction.