page." John Masefield would later single the book out as his favorite of Melville's works. When Redburn was praised, Melville wrote in his journal, "I, the author, know [it] to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with". He later complained: "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches." Assessments Elizabeth Hardwick finds that passages of the book display a rhetorical brilliance: "Throughout Melville's writings there is a liberality of mind, a freedom from vulgar superstition, occasions again and again for an oratorical insertion of enlightened opinion." She points to the passage in chapter 33 where Melville describes the German immigrants preparing for their voyage to America: Interpretations of Redburn generally fall into two schools. The first, usually called the biographical school, may be found in studies of Melville written in the 1920s by critics such as Raymond Weaver, John Freeman, and Lewis Mumford. Typifying this school's approach is Mumford's statement that: By the 1950s, a second school arose which might be called the "mythic" school. Newton Arvin wrote: This new approach represented a broad trend that sought to reinterpret American literature—Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner, and Hemingway—in the light of mythic quests and patterns. In one view, Redburn is "a stronger indictment of an American embarking upon a voyage of international experience than Henry James would produce and a more ironic and embittered portrait of the young protagonist's incapacity for art than James Joyce would produce." Critics have clarified or called attention to particular points. After some debate in the 1980s when the notion was first proposed, critics seem to agree that Aladdin's Palace is a "male brothel", including Elizabeth Hardwick who describes it as "a strange, fastidiously observed, rococo urban landscape unlike any other dramatic intrusion in Melville's writings or in American literature at the time." In addition to the social criticism of the Launcelott's Hey incident (Ch. 37), Melville attacks the evils of alcohol and the exploitation of emigrants by shipping services. The chapter "A Living Corpse", like Charles Dickens' Bleak House, contains an example of spontaneous human combustion in literature (Ch. 48). References Sources Blum, Hester (2011). "Melville and the novel of the sea." The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Eds. Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby,