Posted Thursday morning, August 1, 2019.
Herman Melville’s desk at Arrowhead where he wrote some of his most celebrated novels and stories and his most notorious and strangest one: Pierre or The Ambiguities. Uncredited photo via Literary America.
During the years that he lived at Arrowhead, as the United States got closer to civil war, Melville wrote “Moby-Dick” (1851); “Pierre” (1852); “The Piazza Tales” (1856), a collection of short fiction that included “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”; and “The Confidence-Man” (1857). He wrote epics; he wrote tales. He directed his readers’ attention to acts of horror with a precise command of language and an uncontainable appetite for allegory, especially about whiteness. He indicted the mundane; he dismantled houses; he eviscerated imperialism; he pitied the whale; he hunted missionaries. He wrote about women as if he’d never met one.
---Jill Lepore, from her essay in the New Yorker on Melville’s 200th birthday, “Ahab at Home”.
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