 These scholars moved beyond the acceptance of Melville's first-person accounts in his works as reliably autobiographical.To provide concrete evidence, Leyda searched libraries, family papers, local archives and newspapers across New England and New York to gather "The Melville Log" (1951) to document Melville's day to day activities and transactions.Leyda’s wife, Si-lan Chen, a ballet dancer of international reputation, was the daughter of Eugene Chen, a colleague of the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. Leyda was invited in 1959 to work at the Film Archive of China in Beijing, where he stayed until 1964.