#Typee author crossword plus#

the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree -& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. It will be a strange sort of a book, tho’, I fear blubber is blubber you know tho’ you may get oil out of it. We first hear of his new book in a letter of May 1, 1850, to another literary sailor, Richard Henry Dana, Jr.:Ībout the “whaling voyage”-I am half way in the work. . . .

#Typee author crossword plus#

He worked in a room of a New York household that included his mother, four unmarried sisters, a married brother with his pregnant wife, and two children, plus domestic help. The whaling ships in “Typee,” “Omoo,” and “Mardi” were all points of departure their actual business was left undescribed, it would seem, until the writer felt worthy of the task. The most prolonged of his voyages had been his eighteen months on the whaling ship Acushnet, with briefer stints on the whalers Lucy Ann and Charles & Henry but until 1850 whaling itself had been conspicuously absent from the running fictionalized account he had made of his adventures. Shortly after his return, he, who had written “White-Jacket” and “Redburn” together in a mere five months, settled to compose a sixth book based upon his seafaring days-his whaling experiences in this case. The first surprise that greets us is how young Melville was when he wrote “Moby-Dick.” He was thirty when, on the first day of February, 1850, he returned to New York from a four-month excursion to England whose ostensible purpose was to settle the details of the British publication of his fifth book, “White-Jacket.” He had been married not three years before, to Elizabeth Shaw his first child, Malcolm, was not quite a year old. Something is wrong, these images tell us, with being a writer in America one of Melville’s biographers, Newton Arvin, calls his subject’s treatment by the public “the heaviest count in our literary annals against the American mind.” Inspection of Melville’s books after “Moby-Dick” and of the biographical particulars framing his famous silence yields, however, a few surprises. In the mythology of American letters, the popular and critical failure of “Moby-Dick,” and Melville’s subsequent withdrawal into wounded silence, is a central image, ranking with Henry James’ self-exile to England and Mark Twain’s final phase as a white-suited pet of the rich, and with Fitzgerald’s alcoholic crackup and early death and Hemingway’s spendthrift exercises in celebrity. Photograph from The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty