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Llustrations from “Moby Dick” illustrated by Rockwell Kent courtesy of Plattsburgh State University. But the illustrated “Moby Dick” has remained in print for 75 years, thrilling generations of readers with Melville’s incandescent prose and Kent’s dramatic and haunting engravings. Since 1930, Melville’s-and the book’s-place in the pantheon of literature has remained secure (Starbuck’s, anyone?), while Kent’s artistic reputation has largely waned in the face of abstract expressionism and successive art movements. So when Kent was approached in 1926 with an offer to illustrate Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast,” he suggested “Moby Dick” instead, and the rest is publishing history. Additionally, Melville’s scathing indictment of commerce and materialism in “The Confidence Man” is echoed in Kent’s embracing of socialism. Kent’s early books include “Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan” and “N by E,” recounting sailing adventures to Tierra del Fuego and Greenland. He, too, was an adventurer and fellow traveler (in more ways than one: Kent received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967). Kent was weaned on mysticism and transcendentalism, reading Emerson and Whitman extensively (he also illustrated Leaves of Grass). Melville was of the generation of romantic writers and thinkers that included Emerson and Thoreau he was also a sailor and an adventurer-his first three novels, “Typee,” “Omoo,” and “Mardi,” recount his travels to exotic lands. Both men spent significant portions of their lives in and around New York and the mountains north and west of the city. That Melville and Kent were kindred spirits is evident in their biographies and their paths, which crossed literally and metaphorically. Indeed, it would be hard to find a writer-illustrator combination as well-matched, unless maybe it is Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman, though Kent and Melville didn’t work together, and surely didn’t party together (Kent was 9 when Melville died in 1891).
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Melville was overdue, no doubt, but this was clearly a Reese’s peanut butter cup moment, a happy marriage of writer and illustrator. Both the limited edition (1000 copies) and the Random House trade edition, also published in 1930, sold extremely well, helping push Melville back into the public consciousness. Interestingly, and again not incidentally, the same wave that brought Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau back into view also re-introduced Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright (Mumford, The Brown Decades, 1931).īut the biggest boost to Melville’s reputation came from Rockwell Kent, with the publication in 1930 of the 3-volume Lakeside Press edition of Moby Dick, illustrated and designed by Kent.
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Reassessment and rediscovery began in the early 1920’s, partly through the efforts of critics such as Lewis Mumford (“The Golden Day,” 1926, and “Herman Melville,” 1929), and Carl Van Doren (“The American Novel,” 1921). Immortal words now, but for a period of time prior to 1920, largely forgotten ones, along, not incidentally, with the words and works of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. So begins “Moby Dick”-first paragraph, anyway-the man meets fish (well, aquatic mammal) epic penned by Herman Melville in 1851. “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet…then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”