The Manifesto of Herman Melville

In this iconoclastic and sure to be contentious re-casting by a renowned critic, the great American novel Moby Dick  is presented as a work that has been widely misread, an error that continues to this day. According to Barry Sanders, Herman Melville’s best- known work is not a novel, does not pretend to be a novel, and was not intended by its author to be read as a novel. Moby Dick is this country’s first manifesto, a tocsin sounded to warn us about the encroaching end of nature.