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474 Herman Melville

The History of Literature

CHAPTER

Herman Melville's Life and Times

Herman Melville was born in 1819 in New York City. He went to school at Columbia when he was a child. His most famous narrator, Ishmael, began Moby Dick in the chapter one Lumings section of his classic novel The Grapes of Wrath. In Kafka's story "The Goldilocks Variations," two novices bet on odds and evens but end up losing their entire budget for the day by picking numbers that don't come up often enough.

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And if the ball, there's a little ball, and if the ball lands on your number, you win, you double your money. You can also bet on odds and evens. So the two of them, they're really novices. They start out and say, okay, I'll bet on odd and you bet on even. Not realizing that they would end up only breaking even by that method. But even then, they wouldn't quite break even because the house has a built in advantage. As they notice after they start playing, the only numbers offered are one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, and nine. Five is where the house takes its cut. So you can't win. You can't even break even just by taking odds and evens. You'll lose whenever a five comes up. So you'll lose, I guess, a little more than 10% of the time. So they realize this. They switch their strategy and just pick odds only, hoping that odds will come up more than evens while they're there and hoping that the number five doesn't come up too much. And they end up, the money ends up sliding away slowly down a long slope, as Kafka puts it. In the end, they end up losing all 10 francs their entire budget for the day. And more little nuggets, according to Broad, when they left, they were despondent and they discussed whether they should go to the manager and say they were so despondent, they were going to commit suicide on the idea that the manager might hear that and then give them their money back. They decided against it and went on with their journey. Kafka never entered a casino again. Not bad. One enough to play our little wheel game again next time I get a bigger thrill out of running the number generator and making my way to a Kafka moment, serendipitously, then get a bigger thrill doing that than I do playing gambling for money. This is the game where I always win. The house is much more giving. Maybe that's why books are better than money. Okay. So Herman Melville was born in 1819 in New York City. New York can claim him rightfully as one of their most treasured assets. He died in New York too in 1891. He went to school, sort of a preparatory school at Columbia when he was a child. Other places were in his future, as we'll see, including adventures on the sea, trips to Europe, a stint in Albany, a stint in the Berkshires and on some tropical islands too. But New York City was really what formed him, New York and Manhattan in particular, that island, which of course was not the skyscraping metropolis we know today, but a bustling island surrounded by water, the river boundaries and the ports and the warves, making Manhattan into the busy hub of commerce that launched New York and the rest of America really, and it launched Melville's most famous narrator, Ishmael, who of course began Moby Dick in the chapter one Lumings section

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