Herman Melville

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• SOURCE: The Nation
  6/21/2023
  

  Cormac McCarthy's Brutal Allegories of the American Empire

  by Greg Grandin

  "McCarthy demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering."

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• SOURCE: Slate
  6/6/2022
  

  Reading History for "Lessons" Misses the Point

  by Daniel Immerwahr

  "We read past authors as a sanity check. They reassure us that we’re not alone in what we see."

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• SOURCE: Public Books
  4/27/2021
  

  Literary and Manual Labors: Pittsfield, Massachusetts

  by Jeffrey Lawrence

  Herman Melville's move to Pittsfield in western Massachusetts wasn't a withdrawal from society; he was active in building the cultural life of the Berkshire region. 

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  Herman Melville's Other Masterpiece was a History of Baby Seal Clubbing -- And American Empire

  by Greg Grandin

  "Benito Cereno" is one of the darkest stories in American literature, and based on the life of the seal-clubbing ancestor of FDR.