Moby Dick: Understanding Melville and His Time

America had some of its greatest authors during the 19^th century. This period, also known as “the American renaissance”, was the essential beginning of American literature as the country will still very young. Writers like Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Herman Melville were the featured authors of the renaissance. Melville’s probably most known work, Moby Dick, is recognized as a huge part of this period. Any person that is generally familiar with American literature understands the importance and impact that was created by this white-whale of a novel. However, Moby Dick is anything but a simple voyage to hunt down a monolithic whale. Anyone who wants to read the novel with more understanding must appreciate the background of Herman Melville and when he wrote the novel. The author’s experiences and time on the high seas traveling around the world helped make Moby Dick great. Who would have thought there would be philosophy in whales or poetry in blubber? Few novels that deal in metaphysics, or claim to be the descent of muses, contain as much true viewpoint and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod’s whaling expedition.