Herman Melville's Malcolm Letter

The center of this book is a relatively slight, approximately 500-word, jocular letter Herman Melville wrote to his brother Allan on February 20th, 1849, just after the birth of the novelist's oldest child, Malcolm, who is the subject of the letter, one that is not included in the collected edition (Yale, 1960). Cohen and Yannella use this letter as the occasion for a thorough exploration of Melville-Shaw-Gansevoort family relationships. It is their thesis that the emphasis on authoritarian, Calvinistic parenthood and careful cherishing and preservation of family position and reputation, by example and precept, play an important role in shaping Melville's attitudes in his life and writing, and perhaps, contribute to the poignant suicide of the "prodigy" Malcolm at age 18. Whatever this rather ungainly book, with its 17 separately annotated appendixes, adds to our knowledge of Melville biography, it has also, in its numerous pictures, quotations, and descriptions of interpersonal relationships, its own rewards for the significant interpretation of family life in 19th-century America. * —Choice *