Hershel Parker

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Hershel Parker is an American professor of English and literature who studies Herman Melville. He is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware.

Parker has helped edit and publish major Melville works. He co-edited with Harrison Hayford the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (original edition in 1967, with later updates in 2001 and 2017). He is the General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, and volume 13, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings, was published in 2017, completing the 15-volume set. He wrote a two-volume Melville biography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002). He also edited the first one-volume edition of Melville’s complete poetry, Herman Melville: Complete Poems (Library of America, 2019).

Parker supports traditional methods of literary research. He emphasizes using original materials, studying the work in its historical chronology, and considering the author’s intention. He has spoken against some modern theories that he feels ignore the author’s role.

In the mid-2010s, Parker began contributing to the Journal of the American Revolution. His genealogical research led to a 2024 book, An Okie’s Racial Reckonings, which traces his ancestors’ roles in American history. One chapter tells of a North Carolina relative who, in 1873, won pardons for all KKK members; his opponent was Albion W. Tourgée.

Parker’s biography work has received major recognition. Volume 1 of Herman Melville: A Biography was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and both volumes won top awards from the Association of American Publishers. In 2008, John Matteson read the opening paragraph of Parker’s biography at a CUNY event as an example of strong opening writing. In 2013, Parker published Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, a companion to the two-volume biography that also discusses editing and criticism. The book was noted by The New Yorker Blog and praised in the Wall Street Journal.

Beyond his books, Parker has led several long-term projects. He served as Associate General Editor and then General Editor for the final volumes of the Northwestern-Newberry edition and edited the 1820–1865 section of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. He contributed Chronologies to the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade Melville editions and has expanded Jay Leyda’s Melville Log from 1,000 to about 9,000 pages. He is preparing a three-volume selection for Gordian Press with Robert A. Sandberg. He has collaborated often with Brian Higgins, including Reading Melville’s Pierre (2006). In the 1970s he helped pioneer the study of “lost authority” in American novels by Twain, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others. His 1984 book Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction argued that biographical evidence can illuminate textual criticism, a view that sparked debate but has been widely influential.