Pejman Yousefzadeh

nybooks:

Before heading to the Moby Dick Marathon tonight, read about the man behind the epic novel.

The Great Leviathan by Andrew Delbanco http://j.mp/XhWGla

Herman Melville was judged by his father to be “very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension.” He bounced around as a clerk in a bank and a hat store, helped out on his uncle’s farm and did a brief working stint on a merchant vessel. Then in January 1841, he boarded the whaler “Acushnet” in Massachusetts. “A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” he wrote ten years later in Moby-Dick, with a mixture of resentment and relief at having missed the privileges of the caste into which he was born.

Melville the New Yorker by Alfred Kazin http://j.mp/TUFQTD

Melville is very much a New Yorker, even if his New York is no longer exists. Melville the New Yorker is Melville the young sailor in Redburn, enthusiastically cheering on the Irish immigrants being loaded in the steerage ships for New York harbor. He is the New Yorker in his suggestion of the immensity and unfriendliness of the city in Pierre, for a cardinal point about New York is that, until our day, it was easier to write a memorable novel about Chicago than about New York. Melville is never more a New Yorker than when he is celebrating New York’s incomparable marriage with the sea on the first page of Moby-Dick.