Raymond M. (Raymond Melbourne) Weaver

Raymond Melbourne Weaver was an American professor and literary scholar who taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University for much of his career. He is most closely associated with Herman Melville, whose reputation he helped revive through Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921), widely described as the first full biography of Melville.

Weaver also edited Melville's writings, and his papers at Columbia include material related to both Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic and Black Valley. That combination of teaching, editing, and biographical work made him an important early figure in modern Melville studies.

Born in 1888 and dying in 1948, Weaver is remembered less as a novelist than as a patient literary excavator—someone who helped reintroduce a major American writer to later generations of readers.