Edwin E. Slosson and the Melville Revival

Abstract

In 1904, Edwin E. Slosson quit his position as state chemist of Wyoming. Leaving behind his test tubes and his titration burettes, he moved to New York to become literary editor of the weekly Independent. As part of his editorial responsibilities, Slosson contributed to the magazine a regular column of miscellaneous odds and ends he called ‘A Number of Things’, which Melville scholars have largely ignored. The last week of June 1915 Slosson used the column to predict renewed interest in the writings of Herman Melville. This instalment of his column makes Slosson an unsung hero in the history of Melville’s critical reception. Though a handful of British writers had discovered Melville for themselves in the late nineteenth century, the Melville Revival would not begin in earnest until three events in three successive years had passed: the end of World War I in 1918, the Melville Centenary in 1919, and the release of Moby-Dick in the Oxford World’s Classics in 1920.1