This study examines Herman Melville's literary trajectory in the context of the discourse and
practice of authorship in 19th-century America. Theoretically placed under the double aegis of
Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu it recontextualizes Melville's 20th-century classic status
by projecting his attempts at fashioning a distinct distinguished authorial self against a
broad range of 19th-century texts defining the cultural and political roles of American
authors. It takes its cue (and its title «Words are Things») from an American Review piece of
1847 warning American authors to be vigilant in a period the pre-Civil War years when the
relations between words and deeds literature and the polity were extremely charged. The
Melville who emerges from close readings of relevant literary and cultural material is an
author who had not become «Melville» yet a figure of comparative indistinction to his
contemporaries despite his aspirations to transcendent authorship. This discrepancy is analyzed
in the last chapter which reflects upon Melville's marginality in the 19th-century literary
field until his reinvention as a canonical author in the 1920s.
