Hershel Parker

Hershel Parker is an American professor of English and literature, noted for his research into the works of Herman Melville. Parker is the H. Fletcher Brown Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware. He is co-editor with Harrison Hayford of the Norton Critical Edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1967 and 2001), the General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, and the author of a two-volume biography of Herman Melville published by Johns Hopkins University Press (1996, 2002).

Parker is an advocate of traditional methods of literary research, which emphasize access to original materials, encourage deliberate study of chronology, and examine the relationship between a literary work and the creative genius of its author. He has spoken out against academic schools of thought such as New Criticism, post structuralism and semiotics which ignore or downplay scholarly analysis of authorial intention.

Parker’s work on Ornery People: Who Were the Depression Okies?, a family study in relation to the history of the American South, has led to his becoming a regular contributor to the webzine Journal of the American Revolution.

Volume 1 of Parker's two-volume biography, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1,1819-1851, Vol.2, 1851-1891, was one of two finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Each volume of the biography won the highest award from the Association of American Publishers, the first volume in the category of “Literature and Language” (1997) and the second volume in a new category of “Biography and Autobiography” (2003). On September 22, 2008 at the inaugural public program of the CUNY Leon Levy Center for Biography, "An Eloquent Beginning", one of the presenters, Pulitzer Prize winner John Matteson, read aloud the first paragraph of Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851, as an example of how “the opening paragraph should reflect the character of the subject, the way the music of a great aria fits the mood of the words being sung".

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