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| herman melville's most important literary work was: Moby Dick Herman Melville, 2010-01-01 In Herman Melville's classic tale of revenge, Ishmael tells his story of becoming a whaler on the Pequod. When Ishmael and his unexpected friend Queequeg join Captain Ahab's hunt for Moby Dick, the voyage of a lifetime turns into tragedy. The adventures of sailing the seas on the hunt for the great white whale is retold in the Calico Illustrated Classics adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick. Calico Chapter Books is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO Group. Grades 3-8. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Why Read Moby-Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick, 2013-09-24 A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick’s enlightening and entertaining tour through Melville’s classic. As he did in his National Book Award–winning bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick brings a sailor’s eye and an adventurer’s passion to unfolding the story behind an epic American journey. He skillfully navigates Melville’s world and illuminates the book’s humor and unforgettable characters—finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. An ideal match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? will start conversations, inspire arguments, and make a powerful case that this classic tale waits to be discovered anew. “Gracefully written [with an] infectious enthusiasm…”—New York Times Book Review |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: "This Mighty Convulsion" Christopher Sten, Tyler Hoffman, 2019-11-15 This is the first book exclusively devoted to the Civil War writings of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, arguably the most important poets of the war. The essays brought together in this volume add significantly to recent critical appreciation of the skill and sophistication of these poets; growing recognition of the complexity of their views of the war; and heightened appreciation for the anxieties they harbored about its aftermath. Both in the ways they come together and seem mutually influenced, and in the ways they disagree, Whitman and Melville grapple with the casualties, complications, and anxieties of the war while highlighting its irresolution. This collection makes clear that rather than simply and straightforwardly memorializing the events of the war, the poetry of Whitman and Melville weighs carefully all sorts of vexing questions and considerations, even as it engages a cultural politics that is never pat. Contributors: Kyle Barton, Peter Bellis, Adam Bradford, Jonathan A. Cook, Ian Faith, Ed Folsom, Timothy Marr, Cody Marrs, Christopher Ohge, Vanessa Steinroetter, Sarah L. Thwaites, Brian Yothers |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War Herman Melville, 1866 Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is the first book of poetry published by American author Herman Melville. The volume is dedicated To the Memory of the Three Hundred Thousand Who in the War For the Maintenance of the Union Fell Devotedly Under the Flag of Their Country and its 72 poems deal with the battles and personalities of the American Civil War and their aftermath. Critics at the time were at best respectful and often sharply critical of Melville's unorthodox style. The book had sold only 486 copies by 1868 and recovered barely half of its publications costs.[1] Not until the latter half of the twentieth century did Battle-Pieces become regarded as one of the most important group of poems on the American Civil War. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Dead Letters to the New World Michael McLoughlin, 2003-10-16 This book contextualises and details Herman Melville's artistic career and outlines the relationship between Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Michael McLoughlin divides Melville's professional career as a novelist into two major phases corresponding to the growth and shift in his art. In the developmental phase, from 1845 to 1850, Melville wrote his five Transcendental novels of the sea, in which he defended self-reliance, attacked conformity, and learned to employ Transcendental symbols of increasing complexity. This phase culminates in Moby-Dick , with its remarkable matching of Transcendental idealism with tragic drama, influenced by Hawthorne. After 1851, Melville endeavoured to find new ways to express himself and to re-envision human experience philosophically. In this period of transition, Melville wrote anti-Transcendental fiction attacking self-reliance as well as conformity and substituting fatalism for Emersonian optimism. According to McLoughlin, Moby-Dick represents an important transitional moment in Herman Melville's art, dramatically altering tendencies inherent in the novels from Typee onward; in contrast to Melville's blithely exciting and largely optimistic first six novels of the sea, Melville's later works - beginning with his pivotal epic Moby-Dick - assume a much darker and increasingly anti-Transcendental philosophical position. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman Michael Jonik, 2018-02-22 An ambitious, revisionary study of not only Herman Melville's political philosophy, but also of our own deeply inhuman condition. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Melville's Marginalia Herman Melville, 1987 |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Up from the Depths Aaron Sachs, 2022-06-07 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography A double portrait of two of America’s most influential writers that reveals the surprising connections between them—and their uncanny relevance to our age of crisis Up from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American history—the novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819–1891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). Deftly cutting back and forth between the writers, Aaron Sachs reveals the surprising resonances between their lives, work, and troubled times—and their uncanny relevance in our own age of crisis. The author of Moby-Dick was largely forgotten for several decades after his death, but Mumford helped spearhead Melville’s revival in the aftermath of World War I and the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, when American culture needed a forebear with a suitably dark vision. As Mumford’s career took off and he wrote books responding to the machine age, urban decay, world war, and environmental degradation, it was looking back to Melville’s confrontation with crises such as industrialization, slavery, and the Civil War that helped Mumford to see his own era clearly. Mumford remained obsessed with Melville, ultimately helping to canonize him as America’s greatest tragedian. But largely forgotten today is one of Mumford’s key insights—that Melville’s darkness was balanced by an inspiring determination to endure. Amid today’s foreboding over global warming, racism, technology, pandemics, and other crises, Melville and Mumford remind us that we’ve been in this struggle for a long time. To rediscover these writers today is to rediscover how history can offer hope in dark times. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Piazza Tales Herman Melville, 1856 With fairest flowers, Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele- When I removed into the country, it was to occupy an old-fashioned farm-house, which had no piazza-a deficiency the more regretted, because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burnt painters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains. At least, so looks it from the house; though, once upon the mountains, no circle of them can you see. Had the site been chosen five rods off, this charmed ring would not have been. The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth Stone Hills, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago, that, in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe, fighting the Troglodytes of those subterranean parts-sturdy roots of a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now a long land-slide of sleeping meadow, sloping away off from my poppy-bed. Of that knit wood, but one survivor stands-an elm, lonely through steadfastness. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Society and Solitude and Other Essays Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1871 |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Melville Andrew Delbanco, 2013-02-20 If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Selected Poems of Herman Melville Herman Melville, 2004 Whitman and Dickinson are the two greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, but who is the third? Some critics say Whittier, others say Poe, and these days an increasing number say Herman Melville. The revaluation of Melville's poetry is due in large part to the influence of this landmark volume, for Melville the poet has never found a more judicious, eloquent, or persuasive champion than Robert Penn Warren. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Clarel Herman Melville, Harrison Hayford, Walter E. Bezanson, 1991 Melville's long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville's advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos of almost 18,000 lines, about a naïve American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions. But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville's inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville's friend Hawthorne. Based on the only edition published during Melville's lifetime, this scholarly edition adopts thirty-nine corrections from a copy marked by Melville and incorporates 154 emendations by the present editors, an also includes a section of related documents and extensive discussions. This scholarly edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America). |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Herman Melville and the American Calling William V. Spanos, 2009-07-01 Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U.S.-led global “war on terror.” |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Moby Dick (Fully Illustrated Edition) Herman Melville, 2021-02-06 Moby Dick or The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the work's genre classifications range from late Romantic to early Symbolist. Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world and the greatest book of the sea ever written. Its opening sentence, Call me Ishmael, is among world literature's most famous. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Best of R. A. Lafferty R.A. Lafferty, 2021-02-02 Tor Essentials presents science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure. Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, a winner of the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914-2002) was an American original, a teller of acute, indescribably loopy tall tales whose work has been compared to that of Avram Davidson, Flannery O’Connor, Flann O’Brien, and Gene Wolfe. The Best of R. A. Lafferty presents 22 of his best flights of offbeat imagination, ranging from classics like “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” and “The Primary Education of the Cameroi” to his Hugo Award-winning “Eurema’s Dam.” Introduced by Neil Gaiman, the volume also contains story introductions and afterwords by, among many others, Michael Dirda, Samuel R. Delany, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Robson, Harlan Ellison, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman, and Patton Oswalt. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Mocha Dick Jeremiah N. Reynolds, 2013-04-06 Jeremiah N. Reynolds (1799-1858), an American newspaper editor, lecturer, explorer and author who became an influential advocate for scientific expeditions. Reynolds gathered first-hand observations of Mocha Dick, an albino sperm whale off Chile who bedeviled a generation of whalers for thirty years before succumbing to one. Mocha Dick survived many skirmishes (by some accounts at least 100) with whalers before he was eventually killed. In May 1839, The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine published Reynolds' Mocha Dick: Or the White Whale of the Pacific, the inspiration for Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick. In Reynolds' account, Mocha Dick was killed in 1838, after he appeared to come to the aid of a distraught cow whose calf had just been slain by the whalers. His body was 70 feet long and yielded 100 barrels of oil, along with some ambergris. He also had several harpoons in his body. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Herman Melville Harold Bloom, 2009 Presents a selection of important older literary criticism of selected works by Herman Melville. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Bartleby, the Scrivener Herman Melville, 2015-04-01 Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street is a short story by Herman Melville about a strange man with a strange phrase: I would prefer not to. This American short story is now one of the most famous of American short stories and has been adapted into many variations. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Art of Fielding Chad Harbach, 2011-09-07 A disastrous error on the field sends five lives into a tailspin in this widely acclaimed tale about love, life, and baseball, praised by the New York Times as wonderful...a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting. Named one of the year's best books by the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg, Kansas City Star, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Time Out New York. At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment -- to oneself and to others. First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom. --Jonathan Franzen |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: A Companion to Herman Melville Wyn Kelley, 2015-08-17 In a series of 35 original essays, this companion demonstrates the relevance of Melville’s works in the twenty-first century. Presents 35 original essays by scholars from around the world, representing a range of different approaches to Melville Considers Melville in a global context, and looks at the impact of global economies and technologies on the way people read Melville Takes account of the latest and most sophisticated scholarship, including postcolonial and feminist perspectives Locates Melville in his cultural milieu, revising our views of his politics on race, gender and democracy Reveals Melville as a more contemporary writer than his critics have sometimes assumed |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Israel Potter Herman Melville, 1924 This is Melville's Classic tale of a man that was exiled for fifty years. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Philosophy of Composition Edgar Allan Poe, 2022-07-19 This fascinating literary essay, written by the famous American writer and poet, Edgar Allan Poe, explores the mystique of artistic creation. By using his renowned poem ‘The Raven’ as an example, Poe explains how good writers write well, concluding that brevity, ‘unity of effect’ and a logical method are the most important factors. Taking the reader through the deliberate choices made when writing the poem, the author also discusses theme, setting, sound, and the importance of refrain. ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) is a perfect read for literary scholars, writers, and fans of Poe. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, best known for his gothic, macabre tales that include ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, and ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. One of America’s first short story writers, Poe is considered the inventor of detective fiction and a key figure in both horror and science fiction. His work had a profound impact on American and international literature and he was one of the first American writers to earn international recognition. His other notable works include ‘The Raven and other Poem’s’, (1845) ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and ‘The Tell-Take Heart’. With many of his stories adapted for TV and screen, including the gothic 2014 film ‘Stonehearst Asylum’, starring Kate Beckinsale, Michael Caine, and Ben Kingsley, Poe continues to influence literature, film, and television to this day. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Edgar Allan Poe, 2024-02-05 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a story by Edgar Allan Poe, recounts the adventure of Pym, who embarks clandestinely on a whaler. After a mutiny and various adversities, including cannibalism and natural disasters, the story culminates in a mysterious and inconclusive encounter at the South Pole. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Sarah Vowell, 2015-10-20 From the bestselling author of Assassination Vacation and The Partly Cloudy Patriot, an insightful and unconventional account of George Washington’s trusted officer and friend, that swashbuckling teenage French aristocrat the Marquis de Lafayette. Chronicling General Lafayette’s years in Washington’s army, Vowell reflects on the ideals of the American Revolution versus the reality of the Revolutionary War. Riding shotgun with Lafayette, Vowell swerves from the high-minded debates of Independence Hall to the frozen wasteland of Valley Forge, from bloody battlefields to the Palace of Versailles, bumping into John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Cornwallis, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Antoinette and various kings, Quakers and redcoats along the way. Drawn to the patriots’ war out of a lust for glory, Enlightenment ideas and the traditional French hatred for the British, young Lafayette crossed the Atlantic expecting to join forces with an undivided people, encountering instead fault lines between the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, rebel and loyalist inhabitants, and a conspiracy to fire George Washington, the one man holding together the rickety, seemingly doomed patriot cause. While Vowell’s yarn is full of the bickering and infighting that marks the American past—and present—her telling of the Revolution is just as much a story of friendship: between Washington and Lafayette, between the Americans and their French allies and, most of all between Lafayette and the American people. Coinciding with one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history, Vowell lingers over the elderly Lafayette’s sentimental return tour of America in 1824, when three fourths of the population of New York City turned out to welcome him ashore. As a Frenchman and the last surviving general of the Continental Army, Lafayette belonged to neither North nor South, to no political party or faction. He was a walking, talking reminder of the sacrifices and bravery of the revolutionary generation and what the founders hoped this country could be. His return was not just a reunion with his beloved Americans it was a reunion for Americans with their own astonishing, singular past. Vowell’s narrative look at our somewhat united states is humorous, irreverent and wholly original. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: They Kay Dick, 2022-02 A dark, dystopian portrait of artists struggling to resist violent suppression—“queer, English, a masterpiece.” (Hilton Als) Set amid the rolling hills and the sandy shingle beaches of coastal Sussex, this disquieting novel depicts an England in which bland conformity is the terrifying order of the day. Violent gangs roam the country destroying art and culture and brutalizing those who resist the purge. As the menacing “They” creep ever closer, a loosely connected band of dissidents attempt to evade the chilling mobs, but it’s only a matter of time until their luck runs out. Winner of the 1977 South-East Arts Literature Prize, Kay Dick’s They is an uncanny and prescient vision of a world hostile to beauty, emotion, and the individual. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Hawthorne and Melville Jana L. Argersinger, Leland S. Person, 2008 Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met in 1850 and enjoyed for sixteen months an intense but brief friendship. Taking advantage of new interpretive tools such as queer theory, globalist studies, political and social ideology, marketplace analysis, psychoanalytical and philosophical applications to literature, masculinist theory, and critical studies of race, the twelve essays in this book focus on a number of provocative personal, professional, and literary ambiguities existing between the two writers. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person introduce the volume with a lively summary of the known biographical facts of the two writers’ relationship and an overview of the relevant scholarship to date. Some of the essays that follow broach the possibility of sexual dimensions to the relationship, a question that “looms like a grand hooded phantom” over the field of Melville-Hawthorne studies. Questions of influence--Hawthorne’s on Moby-Dick and Pierre and Melville’s on The Blithedale Romance, to mention only the most obvious instances--are also discussed. Other topics covered include professional competitiveness; Melville’s search for a father figure; masculine ambivalence in the marketplace; and political-literary aspects of nationalism, transcendentalism, race, and other defining issues of Hawthorne and Melville’s times. Roughly half of the essays focus on biographical issues; the others take literary perspectives. The essays are informed by a variety of critical approaches, as well as by new historical insights and new understandings of the possibilities that existed for male friendships in nineteenth-century American culture. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Secret of Lost Things Sheridan Hay, 2008-04-08 Eighteen years old and completely alone, Rosemary arrives in New York from Tasmania with little other than her love of books and an eagerness to explore the city. Taking a job at a vast, chaotic emporium of used and rare books called the Arcade, she knows she has found a home. But when Rosemary reads a letter from someone seeking to “place” a lost manuscript by Herman Melville, the bookstore erupts with simmering ambitions and rivalries. Including actual correspondence by Melville, The Secret of Lost Things is at once a literary adventure and evocative portrait of a young woman making a life for herself in the city. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Letters of Herman Melville Herman Melville, 1960 A collection of correspondence from the renowned author of Moby-Dick which offer insight into Melville's personal life, his thoughts on writing and literature, and his interactions with his contemporaries. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek, 2011-07-11 There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Herman Melville Corey Evan Thompson, 2021-06-24 This reference work covers both Herman Melville's life and writings. It includes a biography and detailed information on his works, on the important themes contained therein, and on the significant people and places in his life. The appendices include suggestions for further reading of both literary and cultural criticism, an essay on Melville's lasting cultural influence, and information on both the fictional ships in his works and the real-life ones on which he sailed. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy, 2010-08-11 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Strike Through the Mask Elizabeth Renker, 1996 Herman Melville was an intense and tortured writer, plagued by writing anxiety, emotional problems, and painful physical ailments. He produced his extraordinary body of work only with great anguish, and he appears to have inflicted great anguish on those around him. According to Elizabeth Renker, we learn much about Melville's fiction if we see how violent and frustrating the experience of writing was for him. In Strike through the Mask Renker argues that Melville's frustrated engagement with the page--characterized by illegible handwriting, chronically bad spelling, and violent manipulations of text--is the most important source of his work's drama and power. She examines the impact on his writing of his struggles with writer's block and depression. And she explores Melville's complex relationship with women, particularly his wife and sisters, on whom he depended to copy and correct his manuscripts. Renker sees Melville's experience of writing reflected in his haunting and enduring theme of disturbing, impenetrable faces. Ahab's famous desire to strike through the mask of the dead, blind pasteboard wall echoes Melville's own relentless striking through and rewriting in his private battle with the blank page. There is... the uncomfortable suggestion that Melville physically and emotionally abused his wife. One letter reveals that Elizabeth Melville's minister proposed a feigned kidnap to spirit her away from husband and home... Those interested must turn to Elizabeth Renker's... Strike Through the Mask. -- Times Literary Supplement Herman relied on [his wife] and his sisters to copy out his illegible manuscripts; those very manuscripts, with his violent revisions, displayed his hostility toward them. And this new view of the relationship, [Renker] said, must change the way we view his work. -- Philip Weiss, New York Times Magazine A fascinating new perspective on Melville's career. From a meticulous scrutiny of the material and visual features of Melville's manuscripts, Renker develops the connections between Melville's works and his strenuous work of composing them. -- Gillian Brown, University of Utah |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Old Man And The Sea Ernest Hemingway, 2012-02-14 Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, has gone 84 days without catching a fish. Confident that his bad luck is at an end, he sets off alone, far into the Gulf Stream, to fish. Santiago’s faith is rewarded, and he quickly hooks a marlin...a marlin so big he is unable to pull it in and finds himself being pulled by the giant fish for two days and two nights. HarperPerennialClassics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Moby Dick Herman Melville, 2010 It was an obsession that would destroy them all. On a cold December night, a young man called Ishmael rents a room at an inn in Massachusetts. He has come from Manhattan to the north-east of America to sign up for a whaling expedition. Later that same night, as Ishmael is sleeping, a heavily tattooed man wielding a blade enters his room. This chance meeting is just the start of what will become the greatest adventure of his life. The next day, Ishmael joins the crew of a ship known as the Pequod. He is approached by a man dressed in rags who warns him that, if he sails under the command of Captain Ahab, he may never come back. Undaunted, Ishmael returns early the next morning and leaves for the high seas. For the crew of the Pequod, their voyage is one of monetary gain. For Captain Ahab, however, it is a mission driven by hatred, revenge, and his growing obsession with the greatest creature of the sea. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Herman Melville's Whaling Years Wilson Lumpkin Heflin, 2004 Based on more than a half-century of research, Herman Melville's Whaling Years is an essential work for Melville scholars. In meticulous and thoroughly documented detail, it examines one of the most stimulating periods in the great author's life--the four years he spent aboard whaling vessels in the Pacific during the early 1840s. Melville would later draw repeatedly on these experiences in his writing, from his first successful novel, Typee, through his masterpiece Moby-Dick, to the poetry he wrote late in life. During his time in the Pacific, Melville served on three whaling ships, as well as on a U.S. Navy man-of-war. As a deserter from one whaleship, he spent four weeks among the cannibals of Nukahiva in the Marquesas, seeing those islands in a relatively untouched state before they were irrevocably changed by French annexation in 1842. Rebelling against duty on another ship, he was held as a prisoner in a native calaboose in Tahiti. He prowled South American ports while on liberty, hunted giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, and explored the islands of Eimeo (Moorea) and Maui. He also saw the Society and Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands when the Western missionary presence was at its height. Heflin combed the logbooks of any ship at sea at the time of Melville's voyages and examined nineteenth-century newspaper items, especially the marine intelligence columns, for mention of Melville's vessels. He also studied British consular records pertaining to the mutiny aboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, an insurrection in which Melville participated and which inspired his second novel, Omoo. Distilling the life's work of a leading Melville expert into book form for the first time, this scrupulously edited volume is the most in-depth account ever published of Melville's years on whaleships and how those singular experiences influenced his writing. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: The Civil War World of Herman Melville Stanton Garner, 1993 A detailed account of Herman Melville's life during the Civil War, as well as study of his war epic, Battle-Pieces. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Best of Herman Melville Herman Melville, 2007-11-01 Includes Billy Budd read by Christopher Timothy and Moby Dick read by Bob Sessions. |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Typee Illustrated Herman Melville, 2020-09-16 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is the first book by American writer Herman Melville, published first in London, then New York, in 1846. Considered a classic in travel and adventure literature, the narrative is partly based on the author's actual experiences on the island Nuku Hiva in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands in 1842, liberally supplemented with imaginative reconstruction and adaptation of material from other books. The title is from the province Tai Pi Vai. Typee was Melville's most popular work during his lifetime; it made him notorious as the man who lived among the cannibals |
| herman melville's most important literary work was: Herman Melville: Complete Poems (LOA #320) Herman Melville, 2019-08-27 An unprecedented single-volume edition of one of America's greatest poets, released to celebrate his bicentennial Herman Melville ranks with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as one of the three great American poets of the nineteenth century. Whether meditating on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, the mysteries of faith and doubt in the Holy Land, or the strange relationship between the Maldive Shark and the pilot fish that glide before “his Gorgonian head,” Melville’s verse combines precise physical detail and rich metaphysical speculation in an unorthodox style and with a compressed power uniquely his own. The fruit of decades of textual scholarship, this fourth and final volume of the Library of America Melville edition gathers for the first time in one volume all of Melville’s poems: the four books of poetry published in his lifetime, his uncollected poems, and the poems from two projected volumes of poetry and prose left unfinished at his death. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is both a deeply philosophical work of mourning for the Civil War dead and a fascinating record of campaigns and battles and the war’s immediate aftermath. With a cast of characters to rival Moby-Dick, the epic poem Clarel, about a young American divinity student’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land, plumbs the profound existential and religious questions that haunted Melville throughout his life. In two late privately issued books, the retrospective John Marr and Other Sailors and Timoleon Etc., the aging poet returns to the nautical scenes and reading of his youth. Many of the poems in the two manuscripts left unfinished at Melville’s death, Weeds and Wildings and Parthenope, have not been previously available in a reliable trade edition. |
Read Herman by Jim Unger on GoComics
3 days ago · Dive into Herman, a comic strip by creator Jim Unger. Learn more about Herman, explore the archive, read extra content, and more!
Read about Herman and Jim Unger - GoComics
"Herman," the hilarious cartoon feature that appears in hundreds of newspapers worldwide, continues despite the passing of creator Jim Unger in June 2012. Unger left a legacy of more …
Herman by Jim Unger for May 4, 2025 - GoComics
May 4, 2025 · Read Herman—a comic strip by creator Jim Unger—for today, May 4, 2025, and check out other great comics, too!
Herman by Jim Unger for December 18, 2024 - GoComics
Dec 18, 2024 · Read Herman—a comic strip by creator Jim Unger—for today, December 18, 2024, and check out other great comics, too!
Read Long Story Short by Daniel Beyer on GoComics
Sep 5, 2022 · Dive into Long Story Short, a comic strip by creator Daniel Beyer. Learn more about Long Story Short, explore the archive, read extra content, and more!
Read Herman by Jim Unger on GoComics
3 days ago · Dive into Herman, a comic strip by creator Jim Unger. Learn more about Herman, explore the archive, read extra content, and more!
Read about Herman and Jim Unger - GoComics
"Herman," the hilarious cartoon feature that appears in hundreds of newspapers worldwide, continues despite the passing of creator Jim Unger in June 2012. Unger left a legacy of more …
Herman by Jim Unger for May 4, 2025 - GoComics
May 4, 2025 · Read Herman—a comic strip by creator Jim Unger—for today, May 4, 2025, and check out other great comics, too!
Herman by Jim Unger for December 18, 2024 - GoComics
Dec 18, 2024 · Read Herman—a comic strip by creator Jim Unger—for today, December 18, 2024, and check out other great comics, too!
Read Long Story Short by Daniel Beyer on GoComics
Sep 5, 2022 · Dive into Long Story Short, a comic strip by creator Daniel Beyer. Learn more about Long Story Short, explore the archive, read extra content, and more!
