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  • The American Scholar

    A WHALE OF A STORY

    Jun 01, 2022 4 minutes
    Review by Steven G. Kellman

    Writers die twice—when they breathe their last breath, and when they cease being read. Herman Melville was 72 when he died of heart failure in 1891, but his books had already been out of print for 15 years. The Melville revival, which propelled him into the canon of American literature as perhaps the Great American Novelist, began in 1919, the centennial of his birth, and gained momentum throughout the 1920s. A pivotal figure in promoting Melville was Lewis Mumford, whose 1926 study celebrated the brilliant convergence of Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau in Massachusetts further enhanced the reputation of the man behind and the classic short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

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