Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.
More Quotes from Carl Clinton Van Doren:
The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.Carl Clinton Van Doren
IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
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Based on Topics: Experience Quotes, Facts Quotes, Imagination & Visualization Quotes, Literature QuotesBased on Keywords: melville, whaling
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