As Melville moved between historical fictions of the late-18th century and portraits of America in the 1850s, he fictionalized figures like Benjamin Franklin, rewrote the memoirs of sea captains and frontier lawmen, and captured with brutal precision and irony, elements of the American character that endure to this day. In the first three sessions of this course, we will cover one short work per week, reserving the last two sessions for the raucous satire of The Confidence-man, which Philip Roth described in 2016 as “the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel” that speaks most directly to America today.  

Herman Melville possessed a warm heart for human nature, a cold eye for the human condition, and the ability to write prose that would awe a Biblical prophet. Join an odyssey through the Rosenbach’s mighty Melville collection in this Behind the Bookcase tour. We’ll chart our voyage through early editions of Melville’s novels and handwritten letters, seeking the source of Melville’s greatness and reflecting on his legacy in the modern day. All aboard as, in the words of Moby-Dick’s Ishmael, we “sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”