Author: Graham Thompson File Type: pdf What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. Between 1853 and 1856, he did write the other way, working exclusively for magazines. He earned more money from his stories than from the combined sales of his most well known novels, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man. In Herman Melville Graham Thompson examines the authors magazine work in its original publication context, including stories that became classics, such as Bartelby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, alongside lesser-known work. Using a concept he calls embedded authorship, Thompson explores what it meant to be a magazine writer in the 1850s and discovers a newMelville enmeshed with forgotten materials, editors, writers, and literary traditions. He reveals how Melville responded to the practical demands of magazine writing with dazzling displays of innovation that reinvented magazine traditions and helped create the modern short story. **Review Thompson persuasively argues that Melvilles short fiction is misread when we neglect the fact that it was initially serialized in magazines, offering genuine insights into a number of Melvilles shorter works. The author carefully analyzes both the professional cultures of Harpers and Putnams and the material culture of paper to make his case.Brian Yothers, author of Sacred Uncertainty Religious Difference and the Shape of Melvilles Career Thompson writes with clarity and liveliness. Herman Melville is substantial and displays terrific command of Melvilles biography and writings.Hester Blum, author of The View from the Masthead Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives About the Author Graham Thompson is associate professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham and author of numerous books, including, most recently, American Culture in the 1980s.