From the Stacks: “The Significance of Herman Melville”

https://newrepublic.com/article/114098/significance-herman-melville-lewis-mumford-stacks

Herman Melville, the celebrated author behind Moby-Dick, was born 194 years ago today. In his honor, we bring you an essay by Lewis Mumford—a legend in his own right—on Melville's philosophy and outlook. Melville may have spent the last years of his life largely forgotten by his contemporaries, but despite that, Mumford argued, Melville's significance was unparalleled. "Melville's settling down was inevitable, inevitable and difficult; but the difficulty was not due to the inability of a restless adventurer to accept a tamer and more even existence," Mumford wrote. "It was due to the fact that, having known a rounded and cultured life, however savage and exacting, he could not submit to the desiccated routine of Western civilization, with its contempt for art, its gross disregard for the higher manifestations of science, its dislike for meditation, its subservient religion, its frank subordination of all other values to that of Comfort. ... Melville's vision, like Emerson’s, like Whitman’s, like Thoreau’s, was a part, and a great part, of a growing whole."