TIL my boy Herman Melville was only 32 when he published Moby Dick. What the fuck am I doing with my life?

Why was Moby-Dick nearly universally panned by critics back in the day?

Same reason people don't like it today. Too long, pretentious, too much whale stuff, "nothing happens," etc.

Faulkner's a highschool dropout.

Well, he wasn't an undegrad... So user is right. Nothing of worth has ever come from an undergrad.

Dropping out of highschool is under graduating college you dumb ugly smelling poor lazy rot on this planet.

When Moby-Dick came out, Melville was famous for Typee and Omoo, travel novels that were all about smoking weed with Polynesian islanders, banging their wives, dodging spears, and diving off waterfalls. Moby-Dick was his bid for a serious literary reputation, and the critics were just baffled. Until the end of his life Typee was the most successful thing he ever wrote.

Haven't read it, but isn't that the definition of "ahead of it's time"?

& Keats died at 25

no, undergrad is a title to someone who's attending college but has not completed it yet. people who don't attent colleges aren't called undergrads, they're called their profession. imagine calling the janitor "an undergrad" because he didn't go to college. kys retard

not necessarily so. It can be in the curriculum today because of the point and not its literary value.
I feel that's the case with gatsby. It's like the little prince, all a bunch of feel good "people are nice" and "life is beautiful" shit that they want to shove up uranus so you'd become a meganormie

what are you talking about, retard? everyone on the gatsby is miserable and vain and wants to suicide.

ugh.... that's the thing, it's that same sentiment, don't you get it? It's at the top normie list. Ask any stacy or chad what's your favorite book and they'll say either prince, catcher or gatsby.

>smoking weed with Polynesian islanders, banging their wives, dodging spears, and diving off waterfalls

If that doesn't sound like a shit-ton of fun I don't know what is. And his poetry was also under-rated, and now it's undergone a resurgence (D.H. Lawrence was a fantastic poet as well, but just associate him with >muh smut)

I think he knew that Moby Dick was a great work.

Partly but also because it was too stodgy and bombastic for the Transcendentalists, who were cool and fashionable at the time.

Gatsby was kept alive because it was distributed to WW2 servicemen via the Council on Books in Wartime, though I think the reason that it specifically has an enduring reputation is more complicated

>Ask any stacy or chad what's your favorite book and they'll say either prince, catcher or gatsby.
do you even go outside

>I think he knew that Moby Dick was a great work.
Nathaniel Hawthorne told him so. That's a lot more worthy than the opinions of the unwashed masses.

yes, that's how i know. i might be biased, but i hate those types of books. Can't really explain it i guess

Yeah, I did know that. I'm not some huge intellect and I picked up Moby Dick with very little in the way of expectation other than "it's good, ahab, boats, the whale kills everyone at the end" and I had realized by thirty pages in that it was good shit.

I don't get Hawthorne. Everything I have read by him is garbage and yet men of clearly good judgment (fucking Melville but also Poe, Longfellow, Henry James, and I'll throw in Harold Bloom) suck his dick. I assume I'm missing something.

>yes, that's how i know.
can't imagine most "stacies and chads" picking a literary book as one of their favorites, let alone the prince, catcher in the rye, or the great gatsby. unless they felt embarrassed of looking like an idiot and picked a book from their high school reading class. but maybe you know better with your sample of n = 1.

Because you have ADHD and aren't autistic enough and are a normie posting on an anime website, why would you appreciate him user?

Browsing reddit and Yea Forums apparently. Want to sit down with me over a bowl of soup and discuss what you could be doing differently?

what kind of soup?
>very important

The unwashed masses were largely illiterate. Being panned in Melville's time meant being panned by and exclusively by the gentry and intelligentsia

prince is by far the most popular choice of "favorite book". Do you live under a rock? Just browse facebook and 80% of stacies will have THE QUOTE on their wall. Catcher is also very popular among the edgy enlightened young adults. Seriously, how do you not know this? I feel like everyone I meet only read one of three books.

>The unwashed masses were largely illiterate
Not in America, they weren't.

>The unwashed masses were largely illiterate.
Not true, at least in the United States, where almost 90% of the population were literate by 1840, even with the lack of centralized education.
>by the gentry and intelligentsia
most of these people were middlebrow plebs by any standard

>prince is by far the most popular choice of "favorite book". 80% of stacies will have THE QUOTE on their wall.
alright, I have to confess that I have no idea what book you're referring to here. do you mean the prince by machiavelli? the little prince?
>just browse facebook
I'm going to stop you right there.
>Catcher is also very popular among the edgy enlightened young adults.
"Chad" or "Stacy" is not term I associate with "edgy, enlightened young adults." You're now moving the goalposts from your original (and ridiculous) claim.
>I feel like everyone I meet only read one of three books.
Then you need to meet more people, or just read more in general if those are the only books relevant enough to be noticeable in your day-to-day life. I have a feeling that these are the only books *you* have read, probably because you had to in high school.

Nah.

Most music was made by people under 30

most music is shit

A big reason was actually because of a fatal publishing error (done without Melvilles consent) where the original British edition didn't contain the epilogue which explains how Ishamel was the sole survivor. Without this, the novel made no sense at all because it seemed as if the narrator of the novel dies in the end. There are about 600 differences between the original Brittish edition and the later American edition.

>the little prince?
yeah, sorry i forgot about machiavelli.
>I'm going to stop you right there.
well you asked if i "went out" so i guess you're really the one with no insight into normie lives
>"Chad" or "Stacy" is not term I associate with "edgy, enlightened young adults.
normies, dear god, why do you have to be so literal. I meant normies in general. chads and stacies, cool "nerds", edgy "indie folk hip kids" etc... you know what i mean by this don't yank my chain man
>Then you need to meet more people
yeah, tell me about it
>or just read more in general if those are the only books relevant enough to be noticeable in your day-to-day life. I have a feeling that these are the only books *you* have read, probably because you had to in high school.
nope, it's just that my convo with new people is "oh hey user this guy said you read all day, have you read min kamp" "no, i don't like hitler" "no, it's not hitler user lol, it's..." "so what's your favorite book?" "idk, i liked goose of hermogenes i guess, you?" "the little prince" end of conversation. every fucking time. It's always some boring shit.

Gazpacho, it’s August

From skimming over contemporary reviews of the book, it seems like a lot of critics who disapproved of the criticism of Christian missionaries and general raunchiness in his previous books automatically assumed Moby-Dick would be more of the same and automatically dismissed it. Even the critics who gave the book a positive review only seemed to like it because it was another "wild sea story."
It seems to me that Melville's career suffered because he was pigeonholed as a writer of genre fiction early on.

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This. Plus comparing shitty pop like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish to Moby Dick is insulting

literary critics are always pseuds, how could you look at melville's sentences and metaphors and not like it? what a bunch of retards

mozart wrote his first symphony when he was 8 years old. could you compare mozart with melville?

>most of these people were middlebrow plebs by any standard
And what about the ones who weren't middlebrow plebs? Do you think that plebs had anything to do with Ulysses being canonized upon publication?

first of all, the only things Americans cared about reading at the time were politics, the Bible, and transcendentalism. the American literary world wasn't mature yet, and mainly parroted what British literary critics had to say. and guess what happened to the British literary critics? they received the terribly edited version of Moby-Dick, titled "The Whale", where the entire epilogue was removed, leaving tons of readers confused about the coherency and the point of the book. there are American reviewers scratching their heads about why the British reviewers hated the ending since this wasn't the time of the internet, or even the time of transatlantic phone calls, where you could just ask or visit somebody's webpage to see what they thought.

the few literary greats of Melville's time who cared to read Moby-Dick the way it was intended, epilogue and all, thought it was amazing, but because it wasn't trendy enough for the times, and because of its publishing errors, it didn't take off at the time of publication. there are many such cases in literature where stellar books fail to launch, for whatever reason, especially in the age where your book has to be marketable to be successful, as the craft is no longer for just the wealthiest elite. most middlebrow people, whether they are handling your product or consuming it, are disappointing pseud NPCs, no matter what epoch they're born into, and you're at the mercy of them as a writer.

i'm not an expert on james joyce, but from what I can tell, he was much more ingratiated into the literary circles of his time than Melville was in Melville's time. probably was much better at self-promotion (as well as more self-aware, especially with his comments about writing things to have literature professors working for years to come) too. he wrote something considered the pinnacle of modern literature, he made a masterpiece that the times called for. melville went against the grain of both what people expected from him as a genre fiction writer of Polynesian debauchery and from what the philosophy of the times called for from writers in general.

Hey uh guys whats up with the whale dick chapter? Or the chapter where he is sqeezing all the ambergris and he starts squeezing other niggas hands and shit? Seem gay

>t. black carm

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>Wanting fame
What for?
>Who were the authors before the creation of universities in roughly 1100?
Very few people want to read at all. Nobody will ever want to read most books published ever again. But the reason for writing is for oneself.

Raymond Chandler didn't publish a book until he was 51, and his masterpiece didn't come out until he was 65.

Your mom went to college

>squeezing ambergris
you brainlet, he's not squeezing ambergris.

>Hard truth bomb: Finish uni first. No one has ever contributed anything worthwhile to literature as an undergrad.
Just kill yourself, you institutionalized drone.

rude

lmao what, are you implying that's young? am i really out here among boomers?

excellent post
best wishes in your literary endeavors

Moby dick was better received in the UK though

It's our institutions which make us human

*sips
Go to college son
*sips

talent shows early in life, if yours did not show yet, well, i have bad news....

shakespeare was 31 when he wrote a midsummer night's dream

kingsley amis said 'i was a very bad and unpromising writer until 25'

>it was too stodgy and bombastic for the Transcendentalists
What? Moby-Dick is a transcendentalist novel.

It seems that whenever some "masterpiece" was poorly received in the US at first, the UK received it better. (I've read about a few examples but the only one I remember by name atm is Pet Sounds.)

I wonder why that is.

The Hardest bomb - Most people who are accomplish anything work their ass off, and even then some of the people who do don't reach their goal
But they tried anyway

Well, Rimbaud was 16 yo and end its career at only 18. He wrote its whole masterpiece in two years...

Brits still have better taste.

same with the pixies.
i'm not sure moby dick was better received in britain though, i think most british writers prefer brit lit

>What the fuck am I doing with my life?
wasting it

poets are typically finished by 23

Because they have better a better grasp of culture.
America has sort of obligatorily produced some great artists, being up until now a European offshoot and ~the place to be~, but on the whole it’s shockingly dumb and vacuous and totally lacking in higher culture—because it has no tradition of it. Some naturally talented American minds have contributed to the Western canon and some, like Whitman, have even tried to inaugurate a rich literary tradition, but they’ve ended up nothing more than anomalies. America for the most part has no artistic sensibilities, the bedrock is too blue collar.

got the job bros

they're giving me the keys to a company car

I can set my own hours

they have to call me "Mr. user" now

and of course I don't have a degree, that's a scam

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But I've been speaking English for five years

>stacy is a fat blue haired sjw w an owl tattoo on their shoulder or dreamcatcher

T. Salesman for kirby that'll go out in a year

This is correct in some sense, but at the same time it's not fair to count Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer etc. as merits to England's case in the Britain vs US equation because the US as we know it did not exist. A much fairer comparison would be the output of the US in the last 200 years compared to the output of Britain.
As to your point of a lack of tradition, national identities have been evaporating at greater or lesser paces in the post-war era. So taking into account my comment above, this gave the US only about 140 years to overcome the colonial hangover and develop its own artistic identity, and I wouldn't discount how much progress was made in that direction over that period.

well it's not a competition is it. the thing is to be honest, not fair. that said i think brit lit of the past 200 years has been better than theirs.
and america can't really develop their own tradition,can they? all the ingredients are european & english.

that said i think brit lit of the past 200 years has been better than theirs.
Definitely not, and it’s not even close. Britain has fallen off hard the last couple centuries, what are you talking about? Who do you have in mind? Are you aware of the gargantuan list of American greats in that 200 years?

America can/could have developed their own tradition just the same as the "English" tradition developed despite the Norman conquest. Arguably the Americans did develop their own tradition in the postwar era, if only in the sense that literature of the postwar era was dominated by works written by Americans, which were distinctly "American" in the sense that they were radically different from what came before them. I mean really, can you imagine postmodern literature existing in a world that didn't include the US? But I suppose I can surmise from your earlier comment that you don't see much merit in authors like Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison, etc.
Anyways, I wouldn't want to make it a competition either, but it is a bit ridiculous to measure the culture of the average Brit on the strength of nearly 1000 years of literature, and then turn around and dismiss Americans for having only 200.

America is a part of the tradition of european literature, mostly of british literature, it's an offshoot. It would be absurd to expect them to just throw away the thousands of years of cultural history that form the basis of literature for every other european country as well.

america offers a vast number of books that in some way resemble british literature and in other ways don't. those other ways are likewise non-american, whether they spring from european cultures like german or french or non-national cultures: jewish, black. no coherent tradition could emerge from all that.
and without a tradition, any writer is adrift, nervously self-assertive, and individualist lost in a crowd of individualists
>it is a bit ridiculous to measure the culture of the average Brit on the strength of nearly 1000 years of literature
it's just the truth isn't it? and obviously the americans aren't as good if they haven't been doing it as long. those writers who were forced to work out from scratch where to go, instead of having their path roughly indicated for them by their predessecors, as in europe.

america takes her writers too seriously, she regards them as key operators in the national heritage business. and 'american literature' no doubt helps boost morale on the home front, but when it goes for export, when the fashionable view is they write better over there, rude noises are in order.

well they have tried to.
the best american writers were the early ones who, without conscious effort, differed from that of their british contemporaries. though none of them actually sounded american (unless whitman's americanisms count as that).

>Britain has fallen off hard the last couple centuries
well that's further than you have authority to go. obviously our post-war lot are bad enough, but the americans are a bloody sight worse.
>Who do you have in mind?
have you read waugh, wodehouse, anthony powell, thomas hardy, robert graves, angus wilson, trollope, kingsley amis, liz taylor, dickens, a.e. housmann, yeats, auden, r.s. thomas or betjeman at all?

of course they differ, they're an offshoot. But they are part of the same giant tree of culture, and it's all rooted in the bible, the greeks, medieval theology, renaissance, etc.

right, it is all western lit

Poe hated Hawthorne

I think the problem that many people have with Hawthorne is that his work always provides a very obvious primary interpretation, and as soon as people find it they stop right there. His work is much subtler than people usually take it for, it's more psychological than philosophical

They probably just tell you whatever to end the conversation as quickly as possible because you're a creepy incel.

>enormously popular during his lifetime
>now virtually forgotten
What happened?

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Yeats was Irish, retard

Orwell didn't go to university at all. Nor did Kerouac.

Kerouac did, on an athletic scholarship, but he dropped out after an injury prevented him from playing.

i meant keats.

>prince is by far the most popular choice of "favorite book"
Yeah maybe the little prince lmao

mozart was a literal child prodigy