Moby-Dick doesn’t deserve the ‘difficult’ label – this sea romance was once loved by office workers, sailors and children

I am currently writing a biography of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby-Dick. The most important thing I have learnt is that Moby-Dick is not – as is often presumed – a difficult book. I claim this on the basis of those who read it, how they did so and what they took from it in the first decades of its life.

Moby-Dick has a fearsome reputation: dense, time-consuming, boring and bizarre. This reputation (although not absolutely unfair) was initially fabricated by a subset of “elite” Anglo-American academic readers in the 1920s to separate it from the very people who had previously sustained…

© La Conversation - mardi 3 juin 2025