Herman Melville: Don’t Saddle Literature with Ideology

College students and noodly academics, in the words of the founder of Festivus: “I gotta lot of problems with you people.” One of the problems I have is with the distortion of writers’ great works as tribute to current trends.

For instance, Herman Melville’s. Everything Melville put down on paper had a reason, no matter how abstruse some of his writings might initially appear. Why would we not make the effort to see what he was getting at? Politics, mostly.

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Luther Ray Abel

Luther Ray Abel is an Associate Editor for National Review. A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Luther is a proud native of Sheboygan, Wis.

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College students and noodly academics, in the words of the founder of Festivus: “I gotta lot of problems with you people.” One of the problems I have is with the distortion of writers’ great works as tribute to current trends.

For instance, Herman Melville’s. Everything Melville put down on paper had a reason, no matter how abstruse some of his writings might initially appear. Why would we not make the effort to see what he was getting at? Politics, mostly.