"Nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesHumanistsPeople from New York CityPhilosophical pessimists
Original Language: English
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Sources
Ken Kesey, interviewed in "Ken Kesey, The Art of Fiction No. 136" by Robert Faggen, in The Paris Review No. 130 (Spring 1994)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herman_Melville
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Herman Melville
1819 – 1891
US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller, Dichter und Essayist
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