Herman Melville

I'm glad I waited until later in my life to read Moby-Dick. If I'd had to read it in high school I would have hated it for the prose and length, and in college I would have focused too negatively on the fact that it is about whaling (angry young man syndrome). Now I can see whaling for the peculiar institution that it was (and unfortunately, in parts of the world still is), but still look past that to see why Moby-Dick has been in print since before the Civil War. --Doug Brown, Call Me Ishmael, Powell's Review-a-Day, February 7, 2009


Call me Ahab, by Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books, October 31, 2002

Melville, by John Samson, American Literary Scholarship, 1998

Melville in Manhattan, by J. Bottum, First Things, October 1997