Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart.
I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case.
Melville locked himself away in his room for months while working on 'Moby Dick.' If I ever decide to write a novel, I hope someone will take pity on me and take me out to dinner instead.
I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.
I don't have a favorite author; I have favorite books. 'Moby Dick' is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. 'Moveable Feast' by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!
It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.
Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.
Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.