Description: These letters are full of passion, humor, doubt, and spiritual yearning, and offer an intimate view of Melville's personality. Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy. The Divine Magnet will provide the general literary public as well as the college classroom with a reliable and beautifully produced volume of Melville's letters to Hawthorne, along with supplemental material, highlighting the relationship between these luminaries of American letters.
Review Quotes:
"The 10 letters collected in this volume, all written between 1851 and 1852, chronicle, albeit one-sidedly, one of the most consequential relationships in American letters. Herman Melville had met Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850 and recognized him instantly as a literary soulmate. Melville's letters (Hawthorne's have been lost) show a rapport and intimacy that go beyond simple mutual respect. [] The appendices, which include Melville's review of Hawthorne's story collection Mosses from an Old Manse and two poems by Melville thought to be about Hawthorne, enhance this portrait of friendship between two literary titans."--Publishers Weekly
"[Orison Books'] new edition of Melville's letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne provides a timely service to literature. Packaged for a broader audience of readers, writers, and lovers of books, this slim volume of ten letters and accompanying pieces invites a new generation to go in quest of Melville's fiction and poetry while sending an older generation back for more. [. . .] The Divine Magnet is lovingly and elegantly put together, short enough to be read in several sittings and expansive enough to occasion revisits again and again."--Sean Ford, Pleiades
"Here is Melville at his most inspired and numinous; every perfervid yet finely honed paragraph is a philosophy, recalling Shelley's essays. [. . .] Niemeyer's probing and nuanced introduction dissects the controversies over Melville's feelings toward Hawthorne and situates the letters and the other works within this unresolved context. [. . .] Niemeyer's volume provides an invaluable reminder of Melville's philosophical fecundity, seeded by Hawthorne's inspiring and enigmatic influence."--David Greven, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies
"Melville's letters to Hawthorne remain a rich source of information and possess a literary and philosophical quality on par with their great fiction, all of which Mark Niemeyer highlights in his recent collection, The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville's Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne. . . . [. . .] The Divine Magnet, therefore, has much to offer the readers of Religion and the Arts. It has the potential to generate a refreshing crosswind for those looking for material to help them chart new courses beyond the waters of post-structuralism and into the confluences of literary studies, theology, and explorations of religious experience. Or, for those already there, the collection can offer a variety of intimations about the depths that both Melville and Hawthorne dove into during a period of profound literary productivity, but which have yet to be fully sounded."--Scott Reznick, Religion and the Arts
"Niemeyer's lovely edition of Melville's letters and Paul Harding's generous, thoughtful foreword are clearly works of love as well as of scholarship. Their essays provide a worthy setting for these unabashed testimonies to the life-giving joy to be found when one human being recognizes in another a reflection or refraction of divine light."--Marilyn McEntyre, the Ruminate blog