Strike through the Mask

This volume argues that Melville as a writer was plagued by writing anxiety, emotional problems, and painful physical ailments. His fiction was produced only with great anguish, and in the process appears to have inflicted anguish on those around him. The text examines the impact on his writing of his struggles with writer's block and depression, as well as his complex relationship with women, particularly his wife and sisters, on whom he depended for copying and correcting his manuscripts.