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If you're looking to read Melville without tackling the lengthy Moby-Dick, I highly recommend the short story Benito Cereno:
http://www.esp.org/books/melville/piazza/contents/cereno.htm...
And there's always the great short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener", perhaps the first commentary on the meaninglessness of office life.
One could also derive interesting parallels to modern times with his
'Confidence-Man' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Confidence-Man
I would prefer not to.
ok
Agreed! Though it's still about 80 pages. If you want to experience Moby Dick but don't feel like a strong reader or haven't found a way to enjoy this kind of literature, I'd recommend the audiobook while you're driving or doing something else for extended periods. The language is meant to wash over you and feel overwhelming.
In the very early Twitter days, writer Jay Bushman did a sci-fi adaptation of Benito Cereno, tweet by tweet. It was the first I encountered that storytelling format, and Jay has gone on to other successes in digital media writing since...
I met him at a BarCamp in Los Angeles, that's how I started following the account. I miss BarCamp.
Anyway, The Good Captain.
Moby Dick is considered the great American novel. As someone who is not well read on American culture, could anyone help me with the surrounding context -- what made it the great American novel. I know I am asking for a lot here.
Thanks folks all those who responded. Now I am better armed. I did have a go at it about an year back. Read around 4~5 chapters and then realized I need more context to fully appreciate what makes it special. I sensed there's a lot of symbolism being used, but couldn't quite put a finger to what exactly. Was quite surprised by the homo-eroticism in some of the chapters, did not expect that. I assumed literature from such times would reflect more 'victorian' values. I presume that might have created a stir then, or may be not, I am not that well versed in American culture, especially from that era.
The U.S. was the dominant whaling country at the time of Moby Dick, but there is little in the book that assumes a knowledge of American history, culture, or literature. It's a candidate for "the great American novel" only because it was written by an American. I've read it more than once, and it strikes me as something completely original, not tied to the conventions or themes of literature of its time or country of origin. You may or may not like it, but "Americanness" won't be the reason.
Personally I prefer authors from the 1920s: Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the like. But Moby Dick is a combination of long, a very American (New England) setting from a certain period in whaling, and a memorable story of obsession. I read it fairly recently and it’s actually a pretty good read. Fell free to start skimming when Melville gets into one of his long-winded encyclopedic descriptions of some whaling topic.
Probably too much to cover in a forum post. This DH Lawrence essay is a good place to start: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/lawrence/dhlch11.htm
Because there's a chapter where they cut off the whales penis, skin it, turn it inside out and wear it as a robe. Everyone thought that was hilarious, but they had to pretend they liked the book for other reasons.
(https://www.shmoop.com/moby-dick/chapter-95-summary.html)
Another amusing example of mundane publishers interested in great profits, but disinterested in (or unable to discern) great literature. That Melville was well-received in Britain is interesting. Serialization soon after became the route to success for many author's novels (those of H.G. Wells, Dickens, Doyle, and Verne among them).
I never knew Moby-Dick was spelled with a hyphen. Fascinating.
This is a little out of left field, but my favorite unexpected literary hyphen is in the title of "Lassie Come-Home" [0]. In the original book, the title was not imploring a missing dog to return. It referred to the untrue accusation that Lassie was a "come-home" dog, trained by scam artists to escape from an unsuspecting buyer and return to be sold to the next sucker over and over again.
The book has a hyphen but the white whale himself doesn't, for historical reasons.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/moby-dick-has-myst...