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Summer 2004 • Vol. XXVI No. 3 • Nonfiction |

Composing Moby-Dick: What Might Have Happened

By E. L. Doctorow

This essay was originally presented by E. L. Doctorow as the Astman Distinguished Lecture at Moby-Dick 2001, a conference hosted by the Melville Society (Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York) to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Moby-Dick’s publication. “Composing Moby-Dick What Might Have Happened” was first published in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

 

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E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015) was the author of several novels, including City of God, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, and The March. Among the honors he received are the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal.

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