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The sea of ambiguity. (author Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick') (The Creators) (Cover Story)

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From: U.S. News & World Report
Date: 19920831
Author:Boorstin, Daniel J.

Melville's 'Moby Dick' was not a critical or popular success although it eventually came to be known as the Great American Epic. Ahab's hunt for Moby Dick is a metaphor for everyone's hunt for whatever they hope to find.

Every generation has chased Melville's metaphor of the deep

Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Balzac and Dickens all found their calling in the written word, a vocation chosen as a way of making themselves "immortal." But we find no clues to such an ambition in the little we know of the young Herman Melville (1819-91). Critics, with some reason, accused ...

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