http://melvillesociety.org/

I wrote the "Note on the Texts" bibliographical essay for HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS published by the Library of America in 2019, the bicentennial year of Melville's birth, and edited by Hershel Parker.

I was on the team of editors who finally brought to completion the fifteen-volume edition of THE WRITINGS OF HERMAN MELVILLE, begun in 1965. As of today, October 29, 2017, the final volume, “BILLY BUDD, SAILOR“ AND OTHER UNCOMPLETED WRITINGS, is available on Amazon as well as the Northwestern University Press website. As a graduate student I worked from June 8 through August 6, 1982 at the Houghton Library at Harvard transcribing the 335 leaves of the PARTHENOPE (formerly “Burgundy Club”) poems and prose pieces contained in fifteen folders. From July 30 to August 2, 1982, I transcribed what was the theretofore unknown and untranscribed, “House of the Tragic Poet.” In the summers of 2013 and 2015, funded by a Visiting Fellowship in the Study of Manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard University, and a travel stipend from Northwestern University Press, I returned to work again with the manuscripts at the Houghton to produce a fresh literal transcription of these same manuscripts, as well as new transcriptions of “Rammon,” “Story of Daniel Orme,” “Under the Rose,” and the thirty-six or so uncollected poems Melville left behind, unpublished, at the time of his death on September 28, 1891.Hershel Parker, General Editor, wrote the “Historical Note.” G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Editor, who contributed to each of the Northwestern-Newberry volumes, wrote the “General Note on the Text" and produced all of the editorial appendices for BILLY BUDD and WEEDS AND WILDINGS. I served as Associate Bibliographical Editor and generated the transcription and reading texts of the PARTHENOPE poems and prose pieces, the three stories, and the 36 poems. I also wrote the "Note on the Text" for PARTHENOPE and the "Headnotes" for the stories and poems. Alma A. MacDougall served as Executive Editor for the final volume, coordinating the final production process.