The novel has been adapted or represented in art, film, books, cartoons, television, and more than a dozen versions in comic-book format. The first adaptation was the 1926 silent movie The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore, in which Ahab returns to marry his fiancée after killing the whale.Bryant and Springer (2007), xxiii–xxv. The most famous adaptation was the John Huston 1956 film produced from a screenplay by author Ray Bradbury. The long list of adaptations, as Bryant and Springer put it, demonstrates that "the iconic image of an angry embittered American slaying a mythic beast seemed to capture the popular imagination." They conclude that "different readers in different periods of popular culture have rewritten Moby-Dick" to make it a "true cultural icon". American artist David Klamen has cited the novel as an important influence on his dark, slow-to-disclose paintings, noting a passage in the book in which a mysterious, undecipherable painting in a bar is gradually revealed to depict a whale.Schultz, Elizabeth. Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth Century American Art, University Press of Kansas, 1995, p.329-330.
The novel has been adapted or represented in art, film, books, cartoons, television, and more than a dozen versions in comic-book format. The first adaptation was the 1926 silent movie The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore, in which Ahab returns to marry his fiancée after killing the whale.Bryant and Springer (2007), xxiii–xxv. The most famous adaptation was the John Huston 1956 film produced from a screenplay by author Ray Bradbury. The long list of adaptations, as Bryant and Springer put it, demonstrates that "the iconic image of an angry embittered American slaying a mythic beast seemed to capture the popular imagination." They conclude that, "different readers in different periods of popular culture have rewritten Moby-Dick" to make it a "true cultural icon". American artist David Klamen has cited the novel as an important influence on his dark, slow-to-disclose paintings, noting a passage in the book in which a mysterious undecipherable painting in a bar is gradually revealed to depict a whale.Schultz, Elizabeth. Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth Century American Art, University Press of Kansas, 1995, p.329-330.