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“... Rogin’s project in these essays, as in his remarkable psycho-historical studies of Jackson and Melville, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975) and Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1985), is to bring together the public domain of American ...”

“... based directly on the Frankenstein plot. Among the novelists who used it, Baldick makes most of Herman Melville and Charles Dickens. He sees Moby Dick as a natural extension of the myth, in which the demon that drives the Frankensteinian Ahab is in effect the dynamic energy of American territorial and industrial expansion. The whale, a mute monster, is ...”

“... keeps the prose furrowed and set firm. When, referring to the narwhal’s tusk, he writes that ‘Herman Melville drolly suggested they used it as a letter-opener,’ there is an audible note of disapproval in the ‘drolly’, as though laughter were not quite the appropriate response to such a natural miracle. The appropriate response is awe, wonder, a ...”

“... Five years before that he published his first book, Call Me Ishmael, an intense, sweeping study of Herman Melville that focuses mainly on the opposed characters of Ahab and Ishmael. Olson’s Ahab is a distinctly Poundian figure, driven by a tragically single-minded determination to impose his will at whatever cost, while Ishmael emerges as an incarnation ...”

“... raising her eyebrows at the answer. She could see why one might want to read interviews with, say, Herman Melville, but couldn’t see the point in being recorded herself. She was, she said, ‘not quite good enough’, or at least not ‘good enough to be considered good’. Her name didn’t rank: she was ‘not one of the good writers of the United ...”

“... the left of the photograph on his FFC visa, Grumbach wrote: ‘I wish to serve under the name of MELVILLE, Jean-Pierre.’ Alain Delon in ‘Le Samouraï’ (1967) and, below, in ‘Le Cercle rouge’ (1970) Herman Melville had been Grumbach’s literary god, alongside Poe and Jack London, ever since he’d read ...”

“... era than of the more complicated era that followed. ‘We are the pioneers of the world,’ Herman Melville wrote of America in the 19th century. ‘The political messiah has come ... He has come in us.’ For most of American history this sense of American righteousness and American mission have stood at the centre of the nation’s ...”

“... and freedom; with friendship toward all peoples of the world. But Nixon was the kind of Quaker Herman Melville warned against: ‘Quakers with a vengeance’. He couldn’t say Allende’s name without sputtering a curse. Just a few days after Allende’s election, Nixon’s CIA told its Santiago operatives to use ‘every stratagem, every ...”

“... elementary misunderstanding of what a writer is and how a writer works, on the order of expecting Herman Melville to be a white whale’. But it might be more accurate, given the clear connections between Jackson’s life and her work, to call it a misunderstanding of what it was (or is) to be a wife and mother. Jackson once said that all her books ...”

“... lotus-eater land, a buddha-realm of flowers and delight which is really like old captain cook and herman melville’. Money is stolen from his pocket while he swims; he doesn’t care. ‘Other guys lost money too, but it’s all so good-natured.’ Wild pigs. Horses eating flowers. The tanker spewing out its oil, before the return to America. We move ...”

“... descends into civil war. The end.The Confidence Man: His Masquerade was the last full-length book Herman Melville published in his lifetime. Moby-Dick had been poorly received and Melville could no longer scrape by on his writing. A flat-out failure, he was about to take a job as a clerk in the New York Customs ...”

“... Tahiti and the rich Japanese cruising grounds. And Lucchesi delights to imagine him there, Melville, of course, ruddiest of writers, strolling in the Malvinas! Strolling beaches of white quartz sand and suddenly seized by impulse, stripping, and plunging out of sight into the frigid surf, to dare the giant kelp coils. Look! ...”

“... of contributors who made the magazine’s reputation. His special subject was the sea: he shared Herman Melville’s vision of New York as a city of the sea, ‘your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted around by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs’. Mitchell was the laureate of the waters around New York. He recorded the arcana of the ...”

“... the absolute refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of rising, as the rest ...”

“... he left without notice on an open-ended cruise in the South Seas, for the purpose of retracing Herman Melville’s early career, in the hope of summoning, from places Melville had touched, that writer’s robust tutelary ghost. Then, on a soundless veranda in the Marquesas, while making notes on an advanced draft of ...”