Herman Melville
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Moby-Dick Is a Novel That Is Mostly About Whales February 26, 2025
According to my records, I read Moby-Dick for the first time in April of 2010. My journey into the book started off quite well. Like most readers, I was surprised by the overt, barely-subtextual homoeroticism—I loved the relationship between Queequeg...
With Melville in Pittsfield March 27, 2024
The fictional Pittsfield, Massachusetts, native Mack Bolan first appeared in Don Pendleton’s 1969 novel The Executioner #1: War Against the Mafia. A self-righteous vigilante (“I am not their judge. I am their judgment”), the by-now-lesser-known Bolan...
100 Years of 'Billy Budd' March 25, 2024
Long celebrated as a revelatory work second only to his great epic, Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s tragic novella Billy Budd has endured periods of extravagant praise, bitter criticism, and overwrought analysis. From the time it first appeared in print...
A Whale of a Time January 18, 2024
If all the chairs are taken during the annual Moby-Dick Marathon, held every January at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, you can always climb aboard the Lagoda. It’s the museum’s pièce de résistance: a half-scale replica of an old whaling ship outfitt...
After Melville November 28, 2023
Writing in 2005, Andrew Delbanco observed, in his critical biography Melville: His World and Work, that the author of Moby-Dick “seems to renew himself for each new generation.” Since the mid-twentieth century, Delbanco notes, “there has been a stead...
