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, 2001, and 2017), and the General Editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of ''The Writings of Herman Melville'', which, with the publication of volume 13, "''Billy Budd, Sailor''" ''and Other Uncompleted Writings'', is now (2017) complete in fifteen volumes. Parker is the author of a two-volume biography of Herman Melville published by Johns Hopkins University Press (1996, 2002). Parker also edited the first ever one-volume edition of Melville's complete poetry, ''Herman Melville: Complete Poems'', published by the Library of America in 2019.

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.

In the mid-2010s Parker became a regular contributor to the webzine ''[http://allthingsliberty.com/ Journal of the American Revolution]''. His ongoing genealogical research in relation to American history led to a 2024 book, ''An Okie's Racial Reckonings'', which traces the involvement of Parker's newly identified ancestors in momentous episodes of American history. One chapter depicts a North Carolina kinsman who in 1873 won full pardons for all members of the KKK. His losing opponent was Albion W. Tourgée, later the novelist of the Reconstruction and the lawyer who lost ''Plessy v. Ferguson''. Provided by Wikipedia