How Moby Dick ruined Melville’s Successful Career

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
amzn.to/3SxD5fA
📚 Omoo
amzn.to/3SvxLJH
📚 Typee, Omoo, and Mardi (There's not really a great edition of just Mardi)
amzn.to/488Cp6r
📚 Redburn
amzn.to/3UoIJU6
📚Redburn, White-Jacket, and Mobi-Dick
amzn.to/3UNtogb
📚 Moby-Dick
amzn.to/485z3ky
📚 Pierre
amzn.to/4bpr2d4
📚 Israel Potter
amzn.to/4bojHdH
📚 The Confidence-Man
amzn.to/3vYoQJd
📚 Billy Budd, Bartleby, and other Stories
amzn.to/3UvSUGl
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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
www.scribd.com/document/28444...\
📰 Southern Quarterly Review
quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text...
📰 Athenaeum Review
archive.org/details/sim_athen...
📰 American Review System
blog.loa.org/2010/10/october-...
Along with some articles I read for research:
🌐 This website is by far the most comprehensive resource I found for all things Melville!
www.melville.org/melville.htm#...
📰 101 Masterpieces: Moby-Dick
www.mentalfloss.com/article/5...
📰 The Life of Herman Melville
www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexpe....
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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

[@josephcorvino1363]

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.

[@DrawntoBooks]

Comments like this help me keep going, so thank you for this ❤️

[@artemisXsidecross]

I am the same age bordering on my ninth decade and the difference between reading and screens has made time an even wider space than before. Imagine what Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman might write about media today.

[@Tolstoy111]

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.

[@lindaharrison3240]

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.

[@dnckrk1701]

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.

[@sbigglesworth4282]

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

[@JohnJohnson-ys6tp]

Thank you for educating me for free.

[@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

[@DrawntoBooks]

He did write a lot of poetry, he just had another career while doing it. Honestly, he probably had a more fulfilling life writing the way he wanted and working a different job. I think many artists have a hard time with the commercialization side of what they do, there’s a difference between what sells and what fills the creative soul.

[@cheriepeden6384]

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

[@annp322]

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.

[@kelvinleonard6078]

Yeah, I too put it down after the cetology chapter and haven't picked it up since, but reading the comments here might help me go back to it (at least at some point in the future)

[@jensraab2902]

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!

[@DrawntoBooks]

Thank you so much, I appreciate you 🫶

[@imagine9616]

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

[@DrawntoBooks]

Thank you! Hope you enjoy it :)

[@pop80ify]

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?

[@DrawntoBooks]

When I was making this, it felt irrelevant to this story because by the time he wrote it his career was already over, but in hindsight, I should have talked about it more. I’m trying to figure out how to make concise videos, but I admit sometimes I still over-edit and take out things that I shouldn’t, it’s something I’m definitely working on.

[@therizinosauruscheloniform2162]

This might be the best book channel on youtube!

[@DrawntoBooks]

Thank you, I really appreciate that! 😭

[@richard-mtl]

I've never read it and have no interest in reading it, but I really appreciated this background on it and the author, thanks!

[@DrawntoBooks]

Thank you!

[@columpaget5167]

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.

[@peterconetta399]

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.

[@bdwon]

_Moby Dick_ a very funny book. I didn't understand that until I listened to a couple of chapters of the Librivox audio book. Then I read the whole thing and appreciated it so much more than I had previously.

[@peterconetta399]

There have been many words to describe "Moby Dick" but funny is a first for me. Thanks. @@bdwon

[@scottnorsworthy4778]

Impressive research and presentation, tho' a little disheartening as a tale of unmerited rejection by Victorian dunderheads. Melville fans may be glad to know, THE WHALE got some wonderfully affirming reviews in England despite the censorship and dropped Epilogue you mentioned in the British edition. Same in the USA, MOBY-DICK received mostly positive notices in 1851-2. Counting them all up I found 82 of 120 = 68% of reviews in 1851-2 were favorable 😍; 17 of 120 = 14% were mixed 👍👎 and only 21 = 18% were negative ☹. IOW a whopping 82% of early reviews were positive or mixed. Not bad for a flop!

[@artemisXsidecross]

If only Herman Melville could reply by a comment here 😉

[@jamessgian7691]

The Symphony of the Supernal Power Melville needed a mighty theme for his “wicked book”. When one goes about accusing God, hunting the Divine Spector and mocking all the various and naive beliefs concerning the Supernal Power, dissembling the accusation of God and the judgment that your fellows are fools requires layering to hide your sacraligious and misanthropic zeal. So Moby Dick is a multi-layered monstrosity of powerfully poetic prose, using a combination of voices, styles, and narrative adjustments that disrupt the narrative and allow for reconsiderations, correctives, and commentary upon the level of interpretation offered. In the Judaic and Christian scriptural interpretations there are four levels of explication: the literal; the allegorical; the moral (tropological) ; and the eschatological (analogically). Very few novels or other works of literature are complex enough to encompass and require these four levels of interpretation. Melville's tale had a source in reality-- the whale ship Essex, and Melville utilizes this tale as a means of establishing a verisimilitude that allows for a literal understanding of his novel as merely an adventure tale. Melville goes to extreme measure to present all the details of whaling and whales, turning chapters into those one might feel belong to a whaling manual rather than a novel. Going even further to provide that very stringent voice of facts and skepticism Melville found insufficient in those who promoted science as if only nature and the scientific method offer us reality--Melville has an entire list opening his book of the etymology of whales. He mocks this simplistic, materialistic view periodically. His description early on of butterflies pinned to a board and labeled by a lepidopterist shows how the very essence of what it means to be a butterfly (its wild, unpredictable flight and vitality) are utterly removed by the time the scientist is ready to label it as the animal it no longer is, but merely resembles. Melville will make fun of those who see Moby Dick as only a whale, and as Moby Dick is God, Melville extends his ridicule to those who do not believe in God or imagine Him as some impersonal, Deistic Deus Abscondis. The water is the spirit world where God dwells, thus "meditation and water are wedded forever". But Melville has no sympathy for those whose view of God as a benevolent, loving Lord either. It is clear that Moby Dick has been the source of great suffering. Ahab's missing leg and the psychological damage he endured in his previous encounter with the divine cetacean show God, in Melville's view, as far from the saccharine, whitewashed loving Heavenly Father of so many simple-minded believers. So the literal and the allegorical interpretations of God and, consequently, of Melville's marvelous novel, both prove insufficient. The moral view fares little better as Ahab's accusations against God, like a violent and angry anti-Job, blast away any idea that there are easy moral lessons behind the workings of Moby Dick's mysterious mannerisms. The eschatological view also suffers ridicule from Melville as he creatively sneaks an epilogue into the middle of his novel in The Town Ho chapter. Here Melville, through a post-Pequod Ishmael, describes a story filled with gospel images and is disbelieved by all in his company. He has them drag in a copy of "The Four Evangelists" (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) upon which Ishmael will put his hand and swear to the "gospel truth" of his tale. But as his tale is, though hidden, the gospel itself, there is a circular, tongue-in-cheek contradiction in his swearing on the gospels that the gospel is true. So complicated were all of Melville's own dealings with God that even these four levels of interpretation prove insufficient to analyze this novel well. We need another level here, and it comes to the fore in the novel when Melville describes in the chapter The Symphony the stepmother kindness of God that almost saves Ahab from his mad quest and his terrible end. The lightning and fire and madness return, but for just a moment we see the other level. That beyond the foolishness of atheism, and beyond the simple-mindedness of easy-belief, with all the horrors of our human helplessness before God, and with all the admitted anger resulting from our dealings with the realities He has left to us, there is something in our humanness that is only answered by that terrible, white, hooded phantom who, from time to time, reveals the only possible healing for our helpless humanity. Melville’s beast of a novel was postmodern before postmodernism in that it deconstructed modernism before it ever got defined. It then dismantled even postmodernism, revealing the vapidness of trying to deconstruct the world as an empty pursuit. If there are any post-postmodern novels, this was certainly the first and remains the most powerful. And all the things people call tedium in the novel are necessary to both reaching this power and familiarizing the readers with the world in which they are engaged

[@artemisXsidecross]

Thank you, I enjoyed reading your comment; I have read Moby Dick the Whale many times and like fishing comeback with another catch. ☮

[@loevkonstantin8072]

Top tier book channel. Keep it up

[@DrawntoBooks]

Thank you so much!

[@RodericSpode]

I don't know about the allegory aspects of Moby Dick, but when I read it my impression is that it should have been edited into two books. One would be the fictional story of Moby Dick, which was great, and the other a non-fiction book about whales and whaling. Maybe that would have ruined the intended meaning of the book, but since I'm not clever enough to figure out the point of the books allegory, a split into two books would have suited me nicely.

[@MilesBellas]

Turgid...... it put me off reading classics aged 8 !😂 ......I recovered!

[@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.

[@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?

[@joelharris4399]

Interesting insights. This is why there is room to reconsider, re-evaluate and to expand upon the existing 'Western Canon," when you consider some of the greats were in fact one-hit wonders who were close to oblivion: Melville, Miguel Cervantes (he too was a failed writer but the exception of one work). Marcus Aurelius never intended his writings to be published for popular consumption, he wrote for himself!

[@Bookreader008]

I value your reviews and would appreciate your thoughts on "MANIPULATED LIVES: Unmasking Social Media's Shadow" by Harmander Singh. Considering your expertise, your insights would help me decide if it's worth a read., please review this underrated book😊

[@BenjWarrant]

I don't remember Ishmael being a cabin boy; I think he would have been rated an Ordinary Seaman, i.e. someone who hadn't been sailing long enough to have learned the skills required to be rated Able Seaman.

[@michaelpeeples1126]

I love both Melville and Hawthorne, but this is the first time I’ve heard of them being “maybe something more.” What are your sources for this thought?

[@DrawntoBooks]

If you read the letters Melville penned to Hawthorne, there is a definite infatuation there. Maybe this article on the letters might be interesting to you: www.themarginalian.org/2019/02/13/herman-melville-nathaniel-hawthorne-love-letters/

[@artemisXsidecross]

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War by Herman Melville (1819-1891). A miscellany of his personal responses to the American civil war, it was published in 1866. In the Prison Pen Listless he eyes the palisades
And sentries in the glare;
’Tis barren as a pelican-beach -
But his world is ended there. Nothing to do; and vacant hands
Bring on the idiot-pain;
He tries to think - to recollect,
But the blur is on his brain. Around him swarm the plaining ghosts
Like those on Virgil’s shore
A wilderness of faces dim
And pale ones gashed and hoar. A smiting sun. No shed, no tree;
He totters to his lair -
A den that sick hands dug in earth
Ere famine wasted there, Or, dropping by his place, he swoons,
Walled in by throngs that press,
Till forth from throngs they bear him dead -
Dead in his meagreness.

[@ChristopherGronlund]

The "You'll never catch me!!" white whale is the greatest thing I will see all week. And, like others...I'm amazed you don't have many more subscribers!

[@DrawntoBooks]

Thank you so much! No one ever comments about my silly illustrations, I appreciate that 😁

[@ChristopherGronlund]

@@DrawntoBooks My wife loved it, too ❤

[@parisgreen4600]

@@DrawntoBooks I love it too - it would be a great die-cut sticker! Haven't read Moby-Dick but I love "Bartleby the Scrivener"...and I've wrestled with "I and My Chimney" and "The Confidence Man."

[@moshecallen]

Ishmael was not a cabin boy.

[@artemisXsidecross]

Pip was the name of the 'cabin-boy' 👍

[@DrawntoBooks]

Awww shoot, my bad 😬 it seems I may not have my whaling terminology down after all.

[@bdwon]

Ishmael is not just a cabin boy. _Moby Dick_ is hilarious!

[@BenjWarrant]

I found the book all but unreadable. The long discourses on the business of whaling were - well, what were they doing there? A good story teller would have put what was necessary to learn about whaling in description and dialogue. The philosophy is not much better. A writer who wants to make philosophical points should allow them to emerge from the story and be in the reader's mind without having to listen to long sermons, delivered either in dialogue or narration. I can't see this as 'the great American novel'. _The Great Gatsby,_ for example, achieves its goals while still be immensely readable; likewise _Of mice and men_ and _An American tragedy._

[@mrjavierpinto]

Critics and the masses are not cultivated to appreciate the new great books. They want thr same old same old

[@DrawntoBooks]

Same with most works of art. Plus the companies that publish them encourage as little risk taking as possible.

[@futurestoryteller]

What happened with British publishers is why I have serious reservations about watching any movie that comes from India or China. If you can't criticize your government can you really say anything?

[@mrbooboohead157]

Lots of countries have had censored eras when it comes to film making but people like hitchcock during hays code and kim ki young in south korea have emerged . I think when the artist is deprived dissent they adopt metaphor.

[@paulgreen2401]

It feels almost crazy to ask this, but is Moby Dick critical of humanity's cruelty to other animals/living beings? I can't imagine how this book could be anything but repulsive if it's isn't. What could a character/author who has such low moral fibre/empathy/compassion offer anyone, really, given that individual life is the only valuable aspect of this world? It reminded me of Ernest Hemmingway, who wasn't known to me beyond his fame, yet who appeared on my radar when J G Ballard mentioned the author's love and admiration for matadors and bullfighting, an aficionado if you like. I struggle to see any value in such a person or their writing, given that they lack very basic empathy, and are shackled by the same old automaton outlooks/sheep mentalities which limit a person's understanding of life in the first instant, the kind of simple mind that would be as content to pet a dog, as force metal spikes into a cow or whale, never seeing any hypocrisy there, such is the blinkered view. I know that I'm well off-topic here, but this is far more important than books or entertainment. No wonder we're such a sick-minded and self-deluding animal. Just take a look at what happens in chicken farms with make chicks, dairy cows with their young, or pigs, the completely unnecessary horrors they endure so your taste-buds can get tickled a bit, a reason that that has even less excuse than serial killers (driven to do so due to abuse at young ages) or paedophiles (can no more help who they're attracted to than a gay person). Food for thought.

[@allafradkin]

It’s a horrible book boring and way too long I’d cut like 3/4 of it. I got to around chapter 11 or do and that was it couldn’t go on …. (It’s all my personal opinion)

[@alsecen5674]

I've read Moby Dick - twice. I assumed that he probably wrote the adventure story first, which was great. Then he realized it was too short for a novel, so he stuffed it with horrible chapters on cetology and philosophy that didn't work. I frankly question why this is considered a great novel.

[@DrawntoBooks]

Nooooo! I always used to think, "it's gonna get better," so I totally understand, but there's not enough time! 😭

[@MilesBellas]

Turgid...... it put me off reading classics aged 8 !😂 ......I recovered!