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Fort Worth, Texas. Herman Melville's life reads just like his books. full of adventure, color. and penetrating genius. William Faulkner confessed he wished he'd written Melville's Moby Dick.
But the high esteem he commands today is far from the reality he experienced during his lifetime. Today we're going to go on an adventure with the man who is now considered America's Shakespeare. Let's take a listen. Yeah. On June 23, 1842, an American whaling ship dropped anchor 2,300 miles southeast of Hawaii in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia.
Two of its young sailors, sick of conditions on board, quietly jumped ship and melted into the forest. Without maps or compass, Herman Melville and his friend Toby Green fought their way through the jungle, uncertain of their destination. Here's Melville from his first book. Taipei. On we toiled, the perspiration starting from our bodies in floods, our limbs torn and lacerated with the splintered fragments of the broken canes, until we had proceeded perhaps as far as the middle of the break.
I sunk down for a moment with a sort of dogged apathy, from which I was aroused by Toby, who had devised a plan to free us from the net in which we had become entangled. Melville and Toby had in fact fallen into the hands of the Taipei natives. The Taipees placed the young Americans under house arrest. But not long after. Toby escaped alone, while Melville found his freedom.
Four months later. Melville's experiences in the Marchesas marked him for the rest of his life as a man who had lived among the cannibals. They also provided material for his first book. Taipei published in 1846. Melville was rescued by an Australian whaling ship in desperate need of men.
and he signed on as a seaman. Here's literary critic Alfred Kazen and Melville scholar Howard Vincent. He had very little formal schooling. None of the great American writers did except those who went to Harvard, like Emerson and Thoreau. You either went to Harvard or you went to the whaling sleep.
He says, a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Now that is a great tribute to experience, the necessity of tough, rough, hard experience.
Soon after landing in Hawaii, he earned his keep working odd jobs as a dry goods salesman and a pin setter at a bowling alley. In August 1842, in hopes of working his way home, Melville enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an ordinary seaman. These fourteen months on board would become the basis for his fifth book. White Jacket published in 1850.
Melville was 25 and had been gone from home for almost four years. He returned to New York and to his distinguished family. As one historian put it, Young Herman's world was one of servants and dancing schools. His grandfathers had been heroes in the Revolutionary War, one a participant in the Boston Tea Party. Born on August 1st, 1819 in New York City, he was the thirdborn of eight siblings.
Herman's father put very little stock in his young son, writing this when his boy was just seven years old. He is very backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things both solid and profound. Herman's father died when he was 12. Herman quits school. But his education never ceased.
He devoured every book he could get his hands on. He took a job in his uncle's bank and his brother's store before he finally went to sea as an apprentice sailor. This was the beginning of many voyages that would lead to the adventures that would mark his literary masterpieces. By the age of 25, Herman Melville had experienced more of the world than most men would in a lifetime. It was 1844, and Melville returned home with sailors' wages and exotic tales of life in the South Seas.
Encouraged by his family and friends, he began to put his adventures to paper. His first book, based on his four months as captive among the cannibals in the Marquesas, was loved by Harper Brothers of New York, but they finally rejected it, saying it was too exciting and impossible to be true, and therefore without real value. Shortly after, a British and then another New York publisher bought The Rights to Taipei, a peep at Polynesian life. Here's literary critic A. Robert Lee.
It was greeted, particularly in England and France, as one of the great ingenuous American works. Here at last was the young American Adam casting free of home, mother, father, the great American family, apple pie, and he'd gone off into that terrible place. The Whaling Fisheries Type was a great success. Reviewers, however, had trouble believing Melville's tale of life among the sensual cannibals until, quite by surprise, his long-lost mate, Toby, turned up in Buffalo, New York and confirmed the story. And there was another of these American wanderers, just as Twain would take that arterial Mississippi River and go down it wandering, just as Poe would wander inside the chambers of his mind, just as Whitman would talk of the open road, notion that Americans are on the move, the westering futuristic impulse.
Tremendous stuff. to those of my ancestors who read it in Victorian England, sitting at home reading Trollope, Browning, Tennyson, listening to the family performances, Sunday church. Here's Paul Metcalfe, Herman Melville's great-grandson. Ooh. Each book represents a different Aspect of his intelligence, of his emotion, of his energy, of his concerns.
When you read the books chronologically, it's like reading his autobiography. Then, Herman Melville met fellow American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. This encounter would affect Melville profoundly and in turn the book that he was struggling to write. first named the whale and later known as Moby Dick. When we come back, more of this remarkable American story, a remarkable American literature story.
Herman Melville's story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to Our American Stories on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get our podcasts. Any story you missed or want to hear again can be found there daily. Again, Please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you get your podcasts. It helps us keep these great American stories coming.
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Stream anywhere. To get a free trial today, go to upfaithandfamily.com slash iHeart. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt.
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That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool.
Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash. Yeah. And we continue with our American stories and the story of America's Shakespeare. Herman Melville.
Let's pick up where we last left off. Melville saw in Hawthorne the writer he aspired to be and eventually dedicated the finished novel to his friend. Here's Hawthorne biographer James Mello.
Somebody like Hawthorne could be an encouragement just by the fact that he had managed to do this. great book, The Scarlet Letter. working on themes about the dark side of human nature. And I think that encouraged Melville to sort of re think the book about the whale that he had already started doing and decide that he could make something greater out of it. Here's Melville historian Jay Lita.
He wanted to write like Awthorne. And so some of that admiration is really the admiration of of a disciple, I think. Whereas Hawthorne took the general and made them particular, Melville tended to take real events and made them symbolic and suggestive. Here's poet and novelist Robert Warren. He wrote Hawthorne saying You dare to say The unsailable.
You recognize the evil in the universe. And he totally unlike. Say Emerson, who called all evil all sin, merely the mumps and measles of the universe to be soon outgrown. That was not Melville. It'll never be outgrown.
It's an unending battle against the white whale. In the fall of 1850, with an advance from his publishers, Melville bought a 160-acre farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He named it Arrowhead. It's here where he would finish what would become the metaphysical classic. Moby Dick.
Here again is A. Robert Lee. Shakespeare, whose language, whose voices, whose ventriloquism were everything to Melville, at once admiring Shakespeare, and at the same time wanting to say We must have Shakespeare's here. Why no American Shakespeare? In August 1851, Herman Melville finished Moby Dick.
He was 31 years old and had written an American book worthy of Shakespeare. A vast, funny, and terrifying story of good and evil. Told through the adventures of one man's mad pursuit of a great white whale. The book is a simultaneous combination of an adventure story, a detailed account of the whaling industry, a cautionary tale, and a metaphor whose meaning scholars still argue over today. Here's how Moby Dick begins.
Call me Ishmael.
Some years ago Never mind how long. I thought that I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. Whenever I grow grim about the mouth and hazy in the eyes... Whenever it's a damp November in my soul. I count it time to get to see.
Almost all men, sometime or other, cherish these same feelings toward the ocean. Why did the old Persians Hold the ocean holy. And the still deeper meaning of that story of Narcissus. Oh. Because he could not grasp the mild tormenting image.
in the fountain. plunged into it. and drowned. That Same image. We ourselves see in all rivers.
in oceans and in lakes and wells. The image of the ungraspable. The Phantom of Life. And that. That's the key to it all.
The speed of his mind, the speed of his ability to go from one imaginative fancy to another, and above all, the way in which he covers the whole world, the whole cosmic world. Effromoby Dick, which is now firmly established, a classic, is the most cosmic book in American literature. And everybody's in it, and every kind of person's in it. He peaked at 32. Um He did other things, interest.
and just first rate, but they were different. There is nothing to compare with Moby Dook. But to do that and to speak in such profundity and to organize that. It's more than the Ninth Symphony.
Okay. It's a juggling act of cerebration and of affect. That is, there is not only left and right hemisphere, but there's a lot of pituitary in there too. There's a lot of passion in that book. Moby Dick has what all the classic works of literature.
have what we like to call a mythical situation. A situation that can appeal to anyone's imagination. Seeking a great beast, you see, it's the myth of the hunt. It's the myth of the big one that got away. It's like Faulkner's bear.
Uh and uh anybody can understand this. Indeed. He develops the uh the sense of this uh great white whale to the point that The whale may very well be the protagonist of the story. You can argue that. He is the hero.
But the notion that this is a chase story is simplistic to say the least. Underneath the visual subplot. is the more real yet unseen plot. Dr. Dwight Lindley is a professor of English at Hillsdale College.
He shares one example of how Melville uses this approach in his storytelling. Captain Ahab, who is this obsessive personality with some real Psychological and moral problems. You know, he wants to be in charge in a way that's just humanly impossible for him to be in charge. He shows that. In order to pursue this vendetta, this impossible task, he has to persuade the men around him to follow him.
And so he becomes a kind of rhetorical master. He told these dramatic, lurid tales of his encounter with Moby Dick and brings them all on board to pursue the blood of this white whale. And promises them gold and They all pile in because he has such a fantastic way of speaking about it. He's very persuasive and Dynamic. But then they end up going to their deaths.
And so one of the things that Melville is thinking about in the story is how tyranny actually works. You know, tyranny is this form of government where a single person dominates over the multitude in the power of his speech and his promises and his vision. But who doesn't actually have the good of the people in mind? And so. One of the things that he's thinking about the whole time is how is it that people actually end up getting sucked into a path that's really bad for them?
Humans all want a dramatic purpose in their lives. And we all want a really powerful reason for living. And so, if we're not very excited about the prospects we have right now, Uh and we don't have a really transcendent awesome reason to be alive, we're going to be easily talked into following somebody who does. if that person has the right kind of persuasive powers. This tale of Captain Ahab and his crew presented the realm of American myth.
In fact, the great white whale wreaking its vengeance on its monomaniacal peg-legged tormentor is one of the most widely recognized images in our nation's literature. We encounter it in comic books, on coffee cups, and in numerous other artifacts of our popular culture. We have absorbed it, ingested it, and appropriated it as a permanent fixture of the American psyche. And you're listening to the story of Herman Melville. And my goodness, what a story it is.
We're especially now talking about his masterpiece, Moby Dick, The movie versions can do it no justice, as movie versions rarely do of great novels, and this may be America's greatest novel. And maybe America's greatest novelist as well. Inspired by Hawthorne. To complete this epic tale, it was first called The Whale. Later Moby Dick.
Where were our Shakespeare's? he asked. By the way, Emerson asked the same thing in his famous Harvard speech in 1839. We needed to create our own American literature and not look to the muses of Europe.
Well, my goodness, here was Melville setting the standard, as Hawthorne did. when we come back more of the story of America's Shakespeare Herman Melville here. on Our American Stories. Awkward time to ask this, but hey, did you download the trail map? Yeah, no, I don't need to.
I don't understand. You're trusting your signal out here? I'm trusting T-Mobile. They have the best network. And if we end up in Bumtots Nowhere, well, we've got T-Satellite for backup.
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Best mobile network based on analysis by Oakland's Speed Test Intelligence Data 2H 2025 with 24-monthly bill credits and four eligible portions on essentials. For well-qualified customers with auto-pay plus taxes, fees, and $35 connection charge per line. Credits and imbalance to if you pay off earlier or cancel, contact us. Finance agreement example $299.99 Moto Edge 5G required. T-Satellite available with compatible device in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.
Included with experience beyond your $10 a month. Autoverne news monthly, cancel anytime. Visit T-Mobile.com.
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Then check out Up Faith and Family, the leading streaming service for inspiring, hope-filled shows and movies. This season streams soul-stirring favorites like Southern Gospel, plus four full seasons of Jesus Calling, and the uplifting new faith series These Stones. Or settle in with 19 seasons of the beloved family series Heartland, a family favorite ranch drama fans can't get enough of. It's commercial free. Stream anywhere.
To get a free trial today, go to upfaithandfamily.com slash iHeart. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work.
It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast.
Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice.
Complete disclosures available at public.com. Yeah, yeah. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of America's Shakespeare. Herman Melville. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Here's the great British actor Patrick Stewart reciting Moby Dick in Star Trek: First Contact. He piled upon the whale's white hump. The sun of all the rage and hate felt my soul race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it. Scully from the X-Files was such a fan of the book she called her dad Ahab and she was Starbuck.
Hello, Starbucks. It's a According to Howard Schultz's book, Pour your heart out, how Starbucks built a company one cup at a time. Starbucks co-founder Gordon Bowker suggested they name their business after the whaling ship in Moby Dick. to his then creative partner Terry Heckler, who responded, Nobody's gonna wanna drink a cup of Pequod. They decided Captain Ahab's first mate Starbuck would be the name of the then unknown brand.
Here again is A. Robert Lee reading and then unpacking Melville's symbolism in Moby Dick. I always go to sea as a sailor. Because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. You couldn't ask anything better than that.
That is the Boy Scout, that is Ishmael, going for that invigorating moment, the sea. We read on For as in this world headwinds are more prevalent than winds from astern, that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim, so for the most part the commodore on the quarter deck gets his atmosphere secondhand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first, but not so.
Now that of course is Melville tricking the reader. What on earth is the Pythagorean maxim? What on earth is this buried reference to these various headwinds?
Well, not to put too fine an edge to it, it is simply that the Pythagorean maxim says, don't eat beans, it gives you wind. If you have wind, you fart. This is a reference inside this most classic of whaling books to a fart. Sailors fart and therefore... Surprisingly, the Commodore gets his wind if you'll forgive me, are from the astern.
In October 1851, Melville's second son was born to be followed by two daughters. Moby Dick's sales were poor and the public's indifference toward the book caused Melville more problems than a bruised ego. He had bet too much on the book's prospective success. He had taken out a second mortgage on Arrowhead and was now having trouble making the payments. He was also overdrawn on the account with his publishers.
Melville again needed a book that would sell. Pierre was written to appeal to his popular audience, but he had miscalculated again. Critics condemned the book, and readers didn't buy it. and the literary community even began to question his sanity. Melville's treatment of sexual themes of incest and illegitimacy was too much for his Victorian audience.
In 1863, he was forced to sell Arrowhead and move back to New York City and turned his attention to poetry. Melville was deeply affected by the Civil War. He traveled to the battlefront and observed the war firsthand. From newspaper accounts and personal observations, he would produce Battle Pieces in 1866, a collection of Civil War poems. Here again is Robert Warren sitting on the battlefield at Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee.
Nobody wanted to read Melville. Melville was a dead man. and felt like a dead man's. And suddenly the war came. And the war woke him up.
His own grief It owns us as a feat. I was now merged. with a much broader one. A wild one, a national tragedy. His personal tragedy was absorbed into that.
And somehow you can't help feeling. But that fact It's what drove him. 2. The Poems on the Civil War. One cannot be profound about life.
I don't think it's possible without touching on the topic of death. Melville did more than touch on the topic. He explicated it. He wrestled with it. He chewed on it.
He thought about it. He spoke to it. He was not obsessed with the topic, but it's in every one of his books.
Okay. In December 1866, at the age of 47, Herman Melville took what amounted to be the first consistent pain job of his adult life. His salary a mere $4 a day. It was a desk job working as a customs inspector, number 75, at the Port of New York. After 19 years of service, a family inheritance allowed Melville to retire from the customs house.
He was 66. Once again, he was free to devote full time to his writing. There was still some interest in him in England, but at home he was almost completely forgotten. And when Melville died at 72 of a heart attack on September 28th, 1891, more people knew him as a retired customs inspector. then as a great writer.
Though he's now recognized as a master of fiction, readers then I just found him weird. Melville was truly a man ahead of his time. It wasn't until the 1920s when the Melville Revival began that he was finally recognized as one of the greatest American writers.
So it should be no surprise that the blank scroll on his gravestone at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx still reminds us how little understood and appreciated this man was in his day. Melville is Apollonian In his thoughts, he is clean and clear. He is Bach-like. But then he's Rococo and Arnate. and Melvillian in the expression of those pristine thoughts.
I like that combination. It's much better than the other way around. A fuzzy thought said simply, Novels, metaphors slide into their meanings and hit you and tap. They don't hit you, they tap you and move away and you have to say, wait a minute, he meant this and that. And that's the way with any great poet.
Love and hate. light and dark, good and bad, morality and license. All these things run all through his book. We like people, don't we, who will take on the large questions. We've lost that Victorian confidence.
The New York Times wrote a week after Herman Melville's death, there has died and been buried in this city. a man who was so little known even by name, To the generation now in the vigor of life, that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him. And this was but three or four lines. He has died an absolutely forgotten man. Moby Dick is now one of the most famous books in the English language.
For all the mockery that he endured during his life, It looks like Herman Melville got the last laugh. He may have seen it coming. For as Ishmael says, There are times when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke. Though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns. And more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And you heard so many great literary voices in that piece, and also some remarkable readings. I urge you, pick up Moby Dick. And what a story we heard about, well, so much. But in the end, the reception to Moby Dick, which was just terrible, sales weren't just poor.
They actually put him into the poorhouse. His reputation fell into the dumpster. And by 1866, he was a full-time worker as a customs inspector. And we learned that when he died, nobody had given him any credit. for the works he'd done, he died almost anonymously.
But those themes that he hit, love and hate, good and bad, morality and license, as one of those critics said, he hit with a flair, a style that Americans fell in love with in the 1920s. The story of America's Shakespeare, Herman Melville's story. Here on Our American Stories. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. After the big game, like most people, I kept thinking about the commercials, and there was one that stayed with me.
It was from the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, and it wasn't loud or flashy. It showed a Jewish kid being targeted at school and another student who chose not to ignore it. As someone who is Jewish, that moment felt very real to me. Not dramatic, just familiar. And what struck me was how clearly it showed that hate doesn't always announce itself, but the impact is still huge.
If you saw the blue square spot during the big game, it's worth thinking about. And if you want to show support, sharing the blue square is one small way to do that. Are you looking for entertainment that lifts you up? Then check out Up Faith and Family, the leading streaming service for inspiring, hope-filled shows and movies. This season streams soul-stirring favorites like Southern Gospel, plus four full seasons of Jesus Calling, and the uplifting new faith series These Stones.
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Mm-hmm.
