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| | Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Review: Melville by Andrew Delbanco |
 | | Andrew Delbanco's life of Herman Melville is beautifully shaped, lucid and shrewd as a psychological portrait of a tormented writer whose work and world were often at terrible odds. |
 | | Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia and a well-known critic, has chosen a middle ground, artfully reading the fiction (and even Melville's late, ungainly poems) for evidence of the author's attitudes toward such things as his strained marriage to Lizzie Shaw, the daughter of a prominent Boston judge, or his own reputation. |
 | | Melville may, as Delbanco explains, have experienced a good deal of sexual confusion, suffering a degree of frustration that is difficult to understand in our age of polymorphous perversity (Freud's term). |
| books.guardian.co.uk /review/story/0,12084,1627682,00.html (1321 words) |
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