The One Book That Ruined Melville

We know Moby-Dick today as a great American classic. But for Herman Melville, it marked the decline of his successful writing career. After writing it, he plummeted into obscurity, dying without anyone even knowing his name.

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MELVILLE BOOKS IN ORDER OF PUBLICATION:
(These are Amazon Affiliate links, If you buy anything through these it will support the channel):

These are links to physical books, but it seems you can get a lot of these on kindle for very cheap or even free!

📚 Typee

📚 Omoo

📚 Typee, Omoo, and Mardi (There's not really a great edition of just Mardi)

📚 Redburn

📚Redburn, White-Jacket, and Mobi-Dick

📚 Moby-Dick

📚 Pierre

📚 Israel Potter

📚 The Confidence-Man

📚 Billy Budd, Bartleby, and other Stories

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FURTHER READING:
Here's some links to articles and things referenced in the video:

📰 Article in The Nation by Raymond Weaver

📰 Southern Quarterly Review

📰 Athenaeum Review

📰 American Review System

Along with some articles I read for research:

🌐 This website is by far the most comprehensive resource I found for all things Melville!

📰 101 Masterpieces: Moby-Dick

📰 The Life of Herman Melville

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CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
00:46 About Moby Dick
01:06 Melville's Career Before Moby Dick
01:29 Writing Moby Dick
01:51 Publishing/British Reception
03:38 American Reception
04:06 Melville Money Problems
04:23 Pierre
04:48 Israel Potter
05:02 Quitting Writing/Death
05:34 Melville Revival
06:21 Moby Dick Legacy

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Music from Epidemic Sound
Stock Footage from Pexels

[josephcorvino]

I just discovered your channel. I am 79 years old and a lifetime reader. I love your reviews, brief, personal, to the point. Don’t stop posting because you don’t yet have a million followers.

[Tolstoy]

His third novel, Mardi, was the initial attempt to write a philosophical quest. But it flopped so he went back to the adventure narrative with the next two novels. Moby Dick, the 6th novel, was an attempt to combine the adventure content with philosophical content.

[artemisXsidecross]

The story Billy Budd mentioned was found in a breadbox after Melville had died. Being a writer is a high wire act without nets; not work for the timid or lacking self direction.
Moby Dick The Whale is an allegory of the United States of 1850.

[sbigglesworth]

What Moby Dick suffered from was being about 50 years ahead of its time.

[ligottifan]

I knew Melville died in obscurity but I had no idea the exact mechanics of how this came about. Thank you so much for this. Moby Dick is my favorite American novel. I can see, from your video, how it arrived at the worst possible time for people to be receptive to it. Thank you

[lindaharrison]

Thanks for this video. It got me all worked up because people are always talking about Ahab this and Ahab that...the book is about so much more than that lunatic. He doesn't even encounter MD until 3/4 of the way into the novel! Anyway, this video shows me that it's time for a re-read on my part. Dec 2018 was too long ago. Besides, there are parts of this book that I love.

[dnckrk]

Thanks for the video. It's an unfortunate fact that many great works of literature and art are not fully appreciated during the author's lifetime. At least Melville has his rightful fame cemented now.

[annp]

I’m finishing reading Moby Dick right now. This is my third attempt at reading it, and I’ve finally realized what a great book it is. The first time I got bogged down in that long and winding description of Queequeg. The second time, it was the cetology chapter that got me. Sometime between then and now, though, I figured out that much of the book is supposed to be funny, including the cetology chapter that everyone gets bogged down on. I realized in this reading that it’s like you met this guy in a bar, and he’s telling you this crazy story about that time he went on a whaling ship, complete with digressions to tell you about all the cool stuff he learned about whales and whaling, much of which is either incorrect or exaggerated (like the imagined size of every whale, it’s truly a fish story). Moby Dick is really the literary version of that sailor in a bar.

[popify]

I loved the video but feel I have to ask, why did you skim over the most profound novel Melville wrote, his last novel The Confidence Man?

[MilesBellas]

"Bowker recalls that a business partner of his, Terry Heckler, thought words beginning with the letters "st" were powerful, leading the founders to create a list of words beginning with "st", hoping to find a brand name. They chose "Starbo", a mining town in the Cascade Range and from there, the group remembered "Starbuck", the name of the chief mate in the book Moby-Dick.
Bowker said, "Moby-Dick didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense."["

[shrelpshrelp]

I mean fine by career we all only imply finances and societal position. Yet, even after Moby Dick, Melville wrote and wrote a lot of poetry, and his poetry writing occupied him for the better part of his last decades. He still published Clarel, and a lot of other poetry books too. And for him too, writing Clarel especially was a spiritually enriching experience.

You should check out volume 2 of Hershel Parker's biography of Melville

[columpaget]

As a Brit it fills me with national pride to discover that we were ruining culture to "avoid offending modern audiences" CENTURIES before this idea caught on in Hollywood.

[cheriepeden]

Thanks so much I love to hear about the trials and tribulations of the great writers.

[fernandofernandez]

Maybe I'm not the only one who reads and listens to you to learn English, because apart from the fact that I like literature, your topic, I like your rhythm of speaking, you go up and down speed, your gestures say a lot, etc., I think you're excellent Teacher, thank you so much.

[imagine]

Actually currently reading Moby-Dick, and this was a great insight! Great video <3

[jensraab]

That's a sad story. I had no idea about all of this.
Oh, and I really appreciate the spoiler alert. 🙏🏽

[cakecogito]

Your videos are absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much!

[tomschaumleffel]

I'm curious which novel where approved by the British and American publishers at the same time they rejected The Whale (Moby Dick)? And how relevant are those other novels?

[peterconetta]

This is a very fine analysis. Thanks. The literary critic Harold Bloom once said that "Moby Dick" is really a poem written as prose. I don't quite understand that but it is a brilliant observation.

[jonathangasana]

Wow interesting video. It’s kinda sad how he never lived to see how popular Moby Dick is. For me, Moby Dick was weird the first time that I read it. Rereading it later in life, I came to appreciate it much as a classic piece of literature.