"Thompson persuasively argues that Melville's short fiction is misread when we neglect the fact that it was initially serialized in magazines, offering genuine insights into a number of Melville's shorter works. The author carefully analyzes both the professional cultures of Harper's and Putnam's and the material culture of paper to make his case."--Brian Yothers, author of Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career "Thompson writes with clarity and liveliness. Herman Melville is substantial and displays terrific command of Melville's biography and writings."--Hester Blum, author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives "Thompson takes good advantage of important, obscure archival materials from publishers' records and offers a number of interesting new readings of these fictions' subtexts."--Choice "Herman Melville Among the Magazines will be of interest to scholars of Melville and anyone curious about the possibilities of a biographical approach to book history. Thompson's study succeeds in returning priority to 'the imaginative acts of authorial creation that brings texts into existence in the first place.'"--SHARP News "Thompson strives to place Melville back into his context .

Throughout his study,Thompson embeds Melville in a world populated by literary composition, paper production, reprinting, magazine paratexts, serialization, competing editorial demands, and a host of other material and cultural environments."--Nineteenth-Century Literature "Thompson's book raises a number of important questions, including just how we should understand the interaction between a periodical's editorial direction and the meaning of particular works that appear in its pages."--Leviathan.