Harrison Mosher Hayford (b. Belfast, Maine 1 November 1916 - d. 10 December 2001 Evanston, Illinois) was a scholar of American literature, most prominently of Herman Melville, a book-collector, and a textual editor.
[2] G. Thomas Tanselle surveyed the scholarship about Herman Melville over the twentieth century and concluded that "Harrison Hayford has been responsible for more basic work —from the maintenance of a file of secondary material to the production of critical editions—than anyone else” .
After his mother died shortly after childbirth in 1891, Ralph took over responsibility from his bereaved father, Loretto, and remained on the farm to raise his four younger siblings.
Holmes held a weekly poetry reading and discussion session in his apartment, where Hayford and Ciardi met Josephine Bosworth Wishart, a graduate student whom both courted.
[10] Hayford was among the students recruited by Yale English professor Stanley T. Williams for his graduate program in American literature.
The group did research in archives and libraries in order to move beyond the first generation of studies, which treated Melville's writings as reliably autobiographical.
[11] Hayford had intended to write his doctoral thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson, but when he found that he could not gain access to crucial archival papers, he turned to Melville.
Along with his Northwestern colleagues Wallace Douglas and Ernest Samuels, he was called one of the “early animators and contributors” to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, formed in 1949.
[15] Selections included essays, short fiction, and poems ranging from the early English poet Bernard Mosher to contemporary writers.
[20] Literary study in the 1940s was dominated by the New Criticism, an approach that focused on close reading of texts and downplayed or excluded the author's life or historical situation.
The ideal of textual criticism was to establish the author's intention, which might well have been lost when the publisher edited the original manuscript or distorted when the printer set type.
[21] Melville left loose pages of the draft manuscript of Billy Budd in disorder on his desk when he died in 1893.
[22] In 1955, Hayford and Merton M. Sealts started to study the manuscript, which had been deposited in Harvard's Houghton Library, and published their findings in a 1962 University of Chicago Press book.
They found that neither of the two previous editors had realized that Melville's wife had begun to prepare the manuscript for publication, but could not resolve the many difficulties and gave up.
Hayford and Sealts corrected readings of many words, distinguished the types of papers to show the order in which they were written, observed how Melville's handwriting and writing instruments changed over the years, and noted his use of crayons and inks of different colors.
[25] At about the same time, the eminent literary figure Edmund Wilson and the publisher Jason Epstein, editor at Random House, proposed a series that would do for American authors what the Pléiade Editions did for French authors, that is, publish standard works in well-designed volumes that could be held and read comfortably.
[26][27] Hayford, who was a consultant for CEAA, applauded Wilson's idea for such a series but insisted that reliable texts must first be established.
In addition, publishers censored or cut many of his early books and Melville made changes and corrections on the page proofs or inserted new material.
Hayford studied the techniques of textual criticism that bibliographers such as Fredson Bowers had developed to analyze Elizabethan texts.
Wilson quoted from the CEAA guidelines and wrote that he was "prepared to acknowledge the competence of Mr. Harrison Hayford, Mr. Hershel Parker, and Mr. G. Thomas Taselle [sic] in the stultifying task assigned them," but that they are sometimes as much bored and annoyed as the reviewer is by these exactions; but the project in the case of Typee has been so relentlessley carried out that in the technical language of this species of scholarship—of 'substantives,' 'accidentals,' and 'copy-texts' -- that a glossary should be provided for readers who are not registered union members—if there are any such readers—of the Modern Language Association.
Julian Markels, writing in the journal American Literature charged that Hayford and Sealts had been wrong to remove the "Preface" from Billy Budd.
He also charged that Hayford used his position as General Editor to push his thesis that Moby-Dick contained "unnecessary duplicates" and that he excluded other interpretations.
[27] After his death in 2001, Northwestern University Press published a collection of Hayford's selected and revised essays, Melville's Prisoners (2003), with an extensive introduction by Hershel Parker.
[37] John Bryant's review in Leviathan notes that it contains both "scholarly-critical essays," in which textual history and bibliographical facts shape and inform critical insight, but also explication de texte, source study, and biography.
[39] One former student estimated that some 200,000 volumes must have passed through Hayford's house over the course of his career, also filling his attic, basement, and garage.
Although he was generous in giving books to graduate students, he sold or donated from this stock only to college or university libraries in thematic groups, such as American fiction, humor, and poetry.
He devoted special attention to areas that were then less developed, such as writings by women and African Americans, in order to encourage research.