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. The Manifesto of Herman Melville traces the evolution of Moby Dick—from its awful, initial reception, very rapidly passing out of print, to its remarkable revival to become lauded as one of America’s great literary classics. That turnaround happened in the early decades of the 20th century and was, in great part, the result of the new and radical aesthetic movements such as surrealism, dadaism, and cubism that allowed for a radical reading of the book. The novel’s new standing as one of the keystones of
