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474 Herman Melville

The History of Literature

CHAPTER

The Unlucky Herman Melville

Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist. Hawthorne's description of Melville after they met in 1856 five years after the publication of Moby Dick let's us know just how far Melville had fallen quote Herman Melville came to see me at the consulate looking much as he used to do a little paler and perhaps a little sadder in a rough outside coat and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner we soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence.

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