Rockwell Kent / Moby Dick

 

Rockwell Kent

MOBY DICK

Rockwell Kent

 

Show caFiction

Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times

The book features gay marriage, hits out at slavery and imperialism and predicts the climate crisis – 200 years after the birth of its author, Herman Melville, it has never been more important

Philip Hoare

Tue 30 Jul 2019 05.00 EDT

Thursday marks the 200th birthday of Herman Melville – the author of the greatest unread novel in the English language. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen eyes glaze over when I ask people if they have conquered Moby-Dick. It is the Mount Everest of literature: huge and apparently insurmountable, its snowy peak as elusive as the tail of the great white whale himself.

Illustration by Rockwell Kent

The True-Life Horror That Inspired ‘Moby-Dick’

The whaler Essex was indeed sunk by a whale—and that’s only the beginning

Gilbert King

March 1, 2013

In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville / Chapter 1

 

Nineteenth-century illustration for Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'Lebrecht Authors / Getty Images

Moby-Dick Was Published 165 Years Ago. Dive in Right Here

BY HERMAN MELVILLE

OCTOBER 18, 2016 1:39 PM EDT

It was Oct. 18, 1851, when Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was first published. Though it was not an immediate hit, and Melville didn’t live to see the fame his book would achieve, it would eventually become one of American literature’s most famous and beloved works of genius. The critic Lewis Mumford would call it “one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language,” and it would inspire adaptations from cinema to emoji literature. Today, because the work is in the public domain, it is easier to read the original than ever before; it can be found online in countless places. Here, get started with the first chapter.—TIME Staff

When Herman Met Rockwell: The Definitive Moby Dick

 

When Herman Met Rockwell: The Definitive Moby Dick

August 07, 2015

Originally posted August 6, 2009 on interiordesign.net

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet…then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

Rockwell Kent followed Moby Dick to the ends of the earth

 

Artist Rockwell Kent followed Moby Dick to the ends of the earth

Posted on December 18, 2021

For me, this is Rockwell Kent’s most magnificent evocation of Moby Dick. We see him breaching in the night, an act of exultation which demonstrates his godlike presence in the sea, and his cosmic relationship to the heavens. This is hardly an evil whale.

Moby-Dick prints by Rockwell Kent

And then there were humans and leviathans, both pursuing light and the night. Where to? Why? Because Ahab is evil? Or is the white whale? Melville found horror in whiteness, but his profound and prescient chapter on the subject deflects nearly as much as it reflects.

 

How Herman Melville Still Shapes the Gulf of Maine 

Two centuries after his birth, the author’s writing about the ocean still resonates

By Richard King

“Loomings” in Moby-Dick, by Rockwell Kent, who spent years of his life in Maine and illustrated the most influential edition of the novel in 1930. Courtesy of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum, SUNY Plattsburgh, USA, Rockwell Kent Collection, Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. All rights reserved. 

The writer Herman Melville’s 200th  birthday was on August 1, 2019. As far as we know, he never dabbed a single toe in the state of Maine. The Moby Dick Hotel in Old Orchard Beach almost certainly does not stand anywhere near where the author of Moby-Dick once slept. He wrote a short poem about a troupe of Mainers who died in Louisiana during the Civil War, and some of his wife’s people lived in Bath and Hallowell, but that’s about as close to Maine soil as we can ascribe to the man, even if Melville surely looked over the rail into the waters of the Gulf of Maine during his three transatlantic voyages to Europe.

Robert McCrum / All Time Top 10

 

Joseph Conrad

All Time Top 10

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

The 100 best novels / An introduction by Robert McCrum

Book Review

Robert McCrum
Sunday 16 August 2015 09.00 BST

Finally, we are left with the classics, often by dead white males, those books to which English language readers worldwide return again and again. Say what you like about my list (and thousands have merrily done so these past two years), the Anglo-American literary tradition, a source of some sublime and imperishable masterpieces, deserves to be celebrated for some astonishing achievements. Here, to provoke Observer readers just one last time, is my All Time Top 10 (chosen from this series, in chronological order):

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

Jane Austen’s Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility.

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

Emily Brontë’s windswept masterpiece is notable not just for its wild beauty but for its daring reinvention of the novel form itself.

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

Wise, funny and gripping, Melville’s epic work continues to cast a long shadow over American literature.

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

This cathedral of words stands today as perhaps the greatest of the great Victorian fictions.

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

Mark Twain’s tale of a rebel boy and a runaway slave seeking liberation upon the waters of the Mississippi remains a defining classic of American literature.

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth.

043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

The Rainbow is perhaps DH Lawrence’s finest work, showing him for the radical, protean, thoroughly modern writer he was.

046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

This portrait of a day in the lives of three Dubliners remains a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare.

050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Woolf’s great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness.

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece has become a tantalising metaphor for the eternal mystery of art.

You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice.

THE GUARDIAN

Book Review 017 / Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

 

Moby-Dick

by Herman Melville 1851

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 17 / Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

John Pistelli
11 December 2016

In his 1850 manifesto-essay in praise of Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville scorns the Anglophile polish and traditionalism of Washington Irving, then considered the greatest American fiction writer, and affirms instead that “it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.” This credo of the modern or even modernist writer from Blake to Beckett is the first step to approaching Moby-Dick, a novel sufficiently original that its contemporaries did not know how to value it. Even at this late date, online reviewers complain about its miscellaneousness and bizarre structure and generic variety; in this, they echo the earliest reviews, included in this Norton Critical Edition, that called the novel “an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact” and “a singular medley of naval observation, magazine article writing, satiric reflection on the conventionalisms of civilized life, and rhapsody run mad.” At least we no longer charge Melville with blasphemy or lunacy.

Herman Melville and Moby Dick by Somerset Maugham

 

Herman Melville and Moby Dick

by William Somerset Maugham

The Art of Fiction

Henry Fielding and Tom Jones

Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice

Stendhal and Le Rouge et le Noir

Balzac and Le Père Goriot

Charles Dickens and David Copperfield

Flaubert and Madame Bovary

Herman Melville and Moby Dick

Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights

Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov

Tolstoy and War and Peace

In Conclusion

(1)

Hitherto I have been dealing with novels which, with all their differences, descend in a fairly direct line from the novels of a remote past. ‘The novel,’ I learn from The Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘has been made a vehicle for satire, for instruction, for political or religious exhortation, for technical information; but these are side issues. The plain and direct purpose of the novel is to amuse by a succession of scenes painted from nature, and by a thread of emotional narrative.’ This puts the matter in a nutshell. The novel, I learn further, came into favour in Alexandrian times, when life was sufficiently easy for people to take pleasure in accounts, realistic or fanciful, of the adventures and emotions of imaginary characters; but the first work of fiction that has come down to us which can strictly be called a novel is one that was written by a Greek called Longus and entitled Daphnis and Chloe. From this, through unnumbered generations, with many ups and downs, with many diversions, are derived the novels I have been briefly considering, whose direct purpose is, as the Encyclopaedia puts it, to amuse by a succession of scenes painted from nature, and by a thread of emotional narrative.But now I come to a small group of novels which are so different in their effect on the reader, which seem to be written with an intention so extraneous, that they must be put in a class by themselves. Such novels are Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights and The Brothers Karamazov; and such are the novels of James Joyce and Kafka. Novelists are, of course, mutations from the common stock of bishops and bar-tenders, policemen and politicians, and so forth; and mutations occur repeatedly. But biologists tell us that most are harmful, and many lethal. Now, since the sort of book an author writes depends on the sort of man he is, and this depends partly on the association in the chromosome of genes from different parents and partly on the environment, it is surely significant that novelists are inclined to sterility; there are only two in history, Tolstoy and Dickens, who were greatly fertile. The mutation is evidently lethal. But perhaps that is just as well, since, whereas oysters when they proliferate produce oysters, novelists generally produce nitwits. The particular mutation I am now concerned with has left, so far as I know, no literary descendants.

I am going to take first the author of that strange and powerful book, Moby Dick. I have read Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville, Charles Roberts Anderson’s Melville in the South Seas, William Ellery Sedgwick’s Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind, and Newton Arvin’s Melville. I have read them with interest, profited by most of them, and learnt from them a number of facts useful to my modest purpose; but I cannot persuade myself that I know more about Melville, the man, than I knew before.

As Herman Melville turns 200, his works have never been more relevant

Naomi Schalit

AUGUST 1, 2019

Outside of American literature courses, it doesn’t seem likely that many Americans are reading Herman Melville these days.

But with Melville turning 200 on August 1, I propose that you pick up one of his novels, because his work has never been more timely. This is the perfect cultural moment for another Melville revival.

The original Melville revival started exactly a century ago, after Melville’s works had languished in obscurity for some 60 years. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, scholars found his vision of social turmoil to be uncannily relevant.

Once again, Melville could help Americans grapple with dark times – and not because he composed classic works of universal truths about good and evil. Melville still matters because he was directly engaged with the very aspects of modern American life that continue to haunt the country in the 21st century.