John Bryant, a renowned Herman Melville scholar, writes in the wake of a veritable palimpsest of biographers: Raymond Weaver (1921), Lewis Mumford (1929), Newton Arvin (1950), Leon Howard (1951), Edwin Havilland Miller (1975), Laurie Robertson-Lorant (1996), Hershel Parker (two volumes 1996, 2002), and Elizabeth Hardwick...