Melville scholarship
Following World War II, Vincent was asked by Hendricks House, an independent publisher, to become general editor of The Complete Works of Herman Melville, whose volumes were to have substantial introductions and extensive annotations. The first volume was Vincent's edition of Melville's poems, published in 1947. Vincent and Luther Mansfield edited the Moby-Dick volume, whose notes and introduction he later adapted for use in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's works. While a number of volumes followed, the series was never finished.
The Blackwell Companion to Melville Studies called The Trying-Out of Moby Dick (1949) "the most useful of the critical studies" of the post-war years. It was a "thorough investigation of Melville's whaling references" that was as "engaging as it is informative" as Vincent "conjoined his scrutiny of whaling sources with an account of the novel's composition...." Willard Thorpe's review said the work was a "fascinating guided tour" and "source-hunting at its best, for the quarry is nothing less than half the humor, sublimity, poetry, and metaphysics of Moby-Dick."[9] Henry Murray said Vincent's book was not "a mausoleum of academic diligence," but a "banquet for gourmets as well as gourmands, a veritable cornucopia of Melville lore," in short, a "well-written, firmly-founded, and henceforth indispensable addition to our knowledge of great literature in the making." [10]
Early biographers of Melville accepted White-Jacket, his 1850 description of life at sea, as reliably autobiographical, but a series of studies showed that much in the book was taken from almost forgotten sea books. Vincent's The Tailoring of White Jacket, says reviewer William Braswell, reexamines the sources already discovered, adds findings of his own, and goes on to analyze the book at length, showing how Melville transformed what he appropriated. Of particular interest, says Braswell, is the discussion of artistic strategies in White Jacket that led to triumph in Moby-Dick and themes such as the ship as microcosm.[11]
Further works
With fellow Melville scholar Harrison Hayford he edited a freshman English anthology, Reader and Writer, which became one of the bestselling English composition texts of its time.[12] The two editors selected essays, short fiction, and poems ranging from the early English poet Bernard Mosher to contemporary writers.[13]
Vincent's Daumier and His World (1968), the first English-language biography of the French artist Honoré Daumier, set out to "show the development of Daumier as a man and as an artist." Kenneth Marantz of the University of Chicago wrote that Vincent fulfilled that promise, though noting its "hero worship". Vincent's writing reflected his "knowledge of letters, money accounts, contemporary commentaries, and a firm grasp of the French political history of the nineteenth century."[14]