/lit/ - Literature

How old were you when you realized Herman Melville is the greatest American author of all time?

>But so it happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him, but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot, such at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of the water heaved colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefor his shipmates called him mad. So, man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent to his God.

>>13594957
> 20th century?
> American
The only correct answer is Melville, since he's timeless.

Has to be Herman Melville. His writing has this incredible passion behind it that sounds like it’s being written in this almost stream of consciousness flurry in terms of the sentence structure and how well everything flows, but somehow every single word choice and description is absolutely perfect, to the point where I have to imagine that he either poured over every single sentence for hours getting them just right, or he had the best instincts of any author I’ve ever read. And he’s more than just the guy who wrote Moby-Dick. I think The Confidence Man is as good as Moby-Dick, while managing to feel completely different. If you loved the denser parts of Moby-Dick as well as its humor, you’d love The Confidence Man. His short stories are phenomenal as well, plus Mardi and Pierre are great and very much worth reading.

Also I’m not sure when or why it became cool to shit on Dostoevsky but it makes me sad. He’s one of my favourite writers as well, whereas I always found Tolstoy pretty overrated.