In a Melville Pioneer’s Archive: Raymond Weaver’s Fragmentary Second Book

The following is a work of archival archaeology. It presents several fragments from the papers of pioneering Melville critic Raymond Weaver. The fragments are themselves not discoveries; indeed, excerpts from one of them have appeared in several publications. But it is here argued for the first time that they belong to a larger, unfinished, and unknown Melville project of Weaver’s. The project is then held up as evidence of the imaginative—even unorthodox—solutions Weaver sought later in his career as critic to the problems of Melville scholarship, problems he found only deepened as he pursued his study of the author.