Herman Melville

With a taste of actual poverty and a whiff of fake charity, Melville leaves us doubting whether our personal ethics have much improved.

Melville suggests that unless the modernizing, industrializing world retained its humanistic sensibilities, we’ll create our own Hells.

Melville provides a more‐​or‐​less first‐​hand account of the almost excruciatingly lucious lives of London’s lawyerly elite.

A failure at business and a failure at life, Jimmy Rose was a lot like the rest of his generation–drowning in change.

Melville’s short story echoes his generation of artists’ widespread fears for America’s future. Without sufficient individual virtue, could polite society survive?

In our final portion from Melville’s “Encantada Sketches,” we examine examples of perfect liberty on Barrington Isle and total tyranny under the Dog King.

In his literary sketches of the Galapagos Islands, Melville sees a lens through which individuals can fully explore existence, power, liberty, and responsibility.

In our final portion from “Bartleby,” we probe Melville’s relationship to Young America and Bartleby’s relationship to our modern world.

In our second portion of “Bartleby,” we ask why exactly his simple expression of preference remains so troubling and meaningful to the present day.

In which a perfectly normal law firm is unexpectedly disrupted by one of modernity’s strangest byproducts: a copyist named Bartleby.