COVER STORY
Moby-Dick
This American Icon continues to resonate in our culture more than 150 years after it was written. Kurt Andersen explores the contemporary influence of Herman Melville’s brilliant novel.

Call Me Ishmael
The composer and performer Laurie Anderson was inspired by the novel to write a strange, cool, modern opera. Her Songs and Stories from Moby Dick premiered in 1999. Thanks to KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic.
Go to Laurie Anderson's official website
Go to Laurie Anderson's site for Moby-Dick

The Original Improvisor
Music historian Stanley Crouch includes Moby-Dick in his lectures about jazz history at Juilliard, even though the novel was written over five decades before jazz developed. According to Crouch, Melville was an expert at improvisation. Produced by Ave Carrillo.
Read a bio of Stanley Crouch

Moby-Dude
Studio 360 presents the world premiere of Moby-Dude from David Ives, the master of the short play. Mark Price plays a contemporary teenager who summarizes the great American novel for his English teacher...in two minutes flat. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

Elizabeth Schultz
University of Kansas Professor Elizabeth Schultz is passionate about Moby-Dick. According to Schultz, Melville would have appreciated David Ives’s short play Moby-Dude -- Melville was something of a prankster himself.
Link to Elizabeth Schultz's book at the University Press of Kansas

Tony Kushner
Playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) says that Moby-Dick had the single greatest impact on his own writing.
Go to the Steven Barclay Agency website on Tony Kushner

Political Resonance
In the dark fall of 2001, images from Moby-Dick surfaced in the press, as a strange literary footnote to the most shocking event of the last half century. Producer Trey Kay speaks with Professors Andrew Delbanco and Samuel Otter about a metaphor that is undeniably powerful and impossible to capture.
Read an article on Andrew Delbanco's work
Read an interview with Andrew Delbanco's work
Read a bio Samuel Otter
Go to a website about the Life and Work of Herman Melville
Go to the Melville Society's website

The Pequod vs. The Enterprise
In her modern opera, Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, Laurie Anderson compares two great sagas about America – Moby-Dick and Star Trek.

Frank Stella
In 1986, legendary sculptor and painter Frank Stella defied Melville’s instruction not to paint the White Whale, and then spent the next twelve years chasing an artistic obsession that Stella says nearly destroyed him. Produced by Leital Molad and Edward Lifson.
Go to an article about Frank Stella's Moby-Dick work
See some images from Stella’s Moby-Dick series

SPECIAL GUEST
Edward Herrmann
Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor Edward Herrmann is our voice of Ishmael. Herrmann boasts an impressive career that spans more than 30 years in theater, film and television.
Go to a biography of Edward Hermann

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He Rises
The great fantasy and science fiction master Ray Bradbury was still relatively unknown when the director John Huston tapped him to adapt Moby-Dick for the big screen. Bradbury tells Kurt Andersen how he channeled Herman Melville while writing the screenplay for the film, which starred Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Go to a web site about Huston’s movie about Moby Dick

The Grand Armada
Professor Elizabeth Schultz discusses her favorite passage from Moby-Dick, from the chapter titled The Grand Armada, where Ishmael and his companions are dragged into the center of a huge pod of whales, and find peace in the midst of the bloody terror of whale-hunting.

Bonus Feature: Rinde Eckert
Composer Rinde Eckert’s opera And God Created Great Whales is a meditation on creativity, memory, madness, and Moby-Dick. Produced by Jeff Lunden.

Special thanks
to the National Endowment for the Humanities for their support of Studio 360's American Icons.  Special thanks also to Mary Beth Kirchner, Sarah Lilley, Barbara Taylor, Andrew Delbanco Tom Lewis, Elizabeth Schultz, and Calvin Skaggs.

Visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum's 9th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon


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