>the greatest English-language novelist of all time was born

>>9779426
Melville makes me proud to be a Burger more than anything

Melville is a complete anomaly. Nothing before or after him is even comparable.

>>9779439
moby dick was the first thing he ever wrote

>>9779448
no one it wasn't u shitlord, he wrote a bunch of sea adventure genre fic which moby dick was as well but it turned out to be literary by accident

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38KB, 448x293px

>>9779426
>>the greatest English-language novelist of all time was born in a country that hadn't been independent for a century

everyone should read moby dick twice in their life.
once when they are 13/14 and then again in their 20s

>>9779439
>who is Mark Twain

>>9779426
America invented independence

>>9779458
Moby Dick is better than Ulysses and Melville was a better poet too
>>9779461
Literal who

>>9779459
Read it every decade (or every other; it ages with you extremely well)

"the greatest English-language novelist of all time"
that's like being the tallest midget

>>9779623
Japanese and Russian are the only other languages with worthwhile novelistic traditions.

>>9779596
>Moby Dick is better than Ulysses
p r a i s e

>>9779635
yerra fucking idiot

how long was newcastle independent before they published hillbilly elegy?

>>9779439
Hawthorne and Twain were great American novelists also. No single 19th-century European novel is as perfect as Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Plus Poe's achievements as a story writer, Emerson's as an essayist, and Whitman's and Dickinson's as poets.