'Moby Dick' is Published

While the settings, events, and characters of Moby-Dick are, to some extent, based on Melville’s youthful experiences as a sailor aboard the New Bedford whaler Acushnet, it was the time he later spent poring over great works of literature, philosophy, history, and science that truly shaped his intellect and inspired his genius. For Melville, reading was not merely the passive counterpart to writing; rather, it was an analytic, synthetic, and, above all, creative process—a process of “active study,” says Peter Norberg, a professor of nineteenth-century literature at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, “through which Melville tried to create a kind of library of reference that was directly relevant to his artistic ambitions.”

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-07/Libr...