Not until the early 20th century was Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick first recognized as a literary masterpiece and touted as a cornerstone of modern American literature. Etching of Joseph O.

Did Melville’s attraction to a neighbor’s wife—or to Nathaniel Hawthorne—spur the writing of "Moby-Dick"? A biography and a novel, respectively, propose those scenarios. WSJ's Brenda Cronin joins ...

In the first article of this series, I described how Herman Melville was born into a mercantile family which fell on hard times, his adventures as a seaman and harpooner in the Pacific as a young man, ...

Writing in The Atlantic last year, presumably while finishing work on “The Passages of H. M.,” a novel based on the life of Herman Melville, Jay Parini declared that the historical novel “has become ...

The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth: How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics Journalist Smialek (Limitless) offers a vivid revisionist history of how classical economics went ...

Hershel Parker, a longtime Melville scholar, is an archival- research fanatic. Working with Jay Leyda on several new editions of The Melville Log (a long documentary compendium of Melville’s life) in ...