What does he mean by that fairly weighty reference? Moby-Dick, Philbrick explains, published in 1851, was itself born in the pre-Civil-War churn of a very tense American consciousness. While it wasn’t a critical or popular success upon publication (critically, he calls it a “great disaster”), Philbrick notes that after World War I, Americans here and abroad came to understand that it contained “the genetic code” for much of what happens in the country where it was written. And he predicts it will cycle back to relevance in difficult times, “whenever we will run into an imminent cataclysm.”

It’s not that Philbrick doesn’t understand that it’s a difficult book to read — in fact, he thinks it makes sense to come to it after you’ve had some life experience and not, one presumes, in the high school and college settings where it’s often been required reading. He notes that Melville himself was influenced by midlife encounters with both Nathaniel Hawthorne and the works of Shakespeare. He even acknowledges that the much-discussed clam chowder and whale anatomy sequences require that the reader “have some patience.” - Linda Holmes

(Listen to the Story Here)

Moby-Dick has been, in a weird way, one of the most influential books in my life. I’m not sure I can explain exactly how except to say there are an infinite amount of ways to tell Moby-Dick if you really want to and if you have a white whale or if your character has one or is one. If you can tell the best version of Moby-Dick that you can, well then you’ve probably got something.