AHAB'S ROLLING SEA

Although Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is beloved as one of the most profound and enduring works of American fiction, we rarely consid er it a work of nature writing--or even a novel of the sea. Yet Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard avers Moby-Dick is the b est book ever written about nature, and nearly the entirety of the story is set on the waves, with scarcely a whiff of land. In fact , Ishmael's sea yarn is in conversation with the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, and Melville himself did far more than live for a yea...[Read more]