If you’ve ever found yourself awash in the frothing whitecaps of Herman Melville’s prose, you are in good company. The authorial harpooner hit the double-century mark this month. So, how shall we ...

Photograph courtesy Library of Congress. In a severe, unsentimental passage about nature, Wallace Stevens wrote, “It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told.” ...

The desolation of a prisoner-of-war camp in the American civil war is drawn with tragic power In the Prison Pen Listless he eyes the palisades And sentries in the glare; ’Tis barren as a pelican-beach ...

In 1857, at a personal and professional low, Herman Melville made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Since Melville was short of funds, his father-in-law financed the trip. Melville, whose 200th birthday ...

The author, who would have been 192 today, is best known as a novelist and short-story writer. But he also wrote verse. Mr. Melville's skill is so great that we fear he has not often felt the things ...

Some critics maintain that the poem was actually a prophetic pre-history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as Melville brilliantly considers the friction between science and issues of faith and ...

A Union reconnaissance party left a camp in Vienna the morning of April 18, 1864, in search of the elusive Confederate partisan ranger, Col. John Singleton Mosby. The three-day expedition into Loudoun ...