[1] Its primary publication is Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, issued three times per year.
[3] The society was founded in February 1945 by Harrison Hayford and Tyrus Hillway.
Both had done doctoral study in American literature at Yale with Stanley Williams.
The membership of the new society included both academics and literary intellectuals in the Melville Revival of the 1920s and 1930s and from university graduate programs that in the late 1930s began to train scholars in American literature.
[5][3][4] Among the presidents were Willard Thorp (1952), Merton Sealts (1953), Harrison Hayford (1955, 1970), (1992), (1999), Richard H. Fogle, (1961), Henry A. Murray (1966) (1980), Walter Bezanson (1967) (1989), Leon Howard (1971), Robert Penn Warren (1974), Jay Leyda (1976) (1987), Lewis Mumford (1977), G. Thomas Tanselle (1982), Hershel Parker (1991), H. Bruce Franklin (1993), Andrew Delbanco (2007).