America 250th Anniversary Summer Reading- Moby Dick

Book One of Our 250th Celebration

“Call me Ishmael.”

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a nation was born on an audacious idea — that human beings could govern themselves, that freedom was a birthright, that a new kind of people could sail off the edge of the known world and build something unprecedented.

Herman Melville had doubts.

Published in 1851, Moby-Dick is the great American novel — a vast, strange, magnificent obsession of a book that asks what this country is really made of. It is an adventure story, a philosophical inquiry, a maritime encyclopedia, a tragedy, and a hymn to human striving, all at once. No other novel captures the particular madness and grandeur of the American spirit quite like it.

There is a recurring obsession at the heart of American literature. It takes different forms — a white whale on the open ocean, a green light across a dark bay — but it is always the same thing: the object that cannot be reached, the dream that will not let go, the horizon that recedes the closer you sail toward it. American writers have returned to this image again and again because America itself was founded on it. The nation was born reaching for something just beyond its grasp, and it has never stopped.

Moby-Dick is where that obsession begins. Every great American novel that follows is, in some way, in conversation with it. When Fitzgerald’s Gatsby stares across the water at that green light, he is Ahab’s descendant — a man of titanic will, consumed by a singular dream, unable to turn back. The white whale and the green light are the same symbol, seventy years apart, asking the same question America has always asked of itself: what happens to a man — to a nation — when the dream becomes everything?

This summer we begin a conversation that will carry through our entire 250th anniversary celebration — about the shape of the American dream and the cost of chasing it, about what this country has been and what it still might become.

For fourteen years, the South Florida Libation and Literature Book Club has been reading America — its myths, its failures, its gorgeous contradictions. This summer, on the occasion of the nation’s 250th anniversary, we go to the source.

This is Book One of our summer 250th anniversary reading series.

Moby-Dick is long and it will challenge you. It will also reward you in ways few books can. Come ready to argue, to wonder, and to ask what 250 years of this grand experiment has actually produced.

The sea is the same. The whale is still out there.

Join us this summer.