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Title: From Sea Yarn to High Tragedy
Review: Melville is something of an enigma, as if his brief and quickly declining career were a stage for the apparition called Moby Dick, most likely the Great American Novel, and one of the few novels ever written to approach the tragic mode in the true sense. This brisk and not overly detailed biography is a good lean introduction to the life, or what's known of it, and thus a fitting portrait of the secret intensity of the man behind his sluggish career as a writer. None of which matters beside the magnificence of the greatest of all sea yarns.
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