Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times

Herman Melville biographer Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) lived a life inextricable from his subject according to this fascinating account. Sachs (The Humboldt Current), a Cornell history professor, argues that the “juxtaposed resonances” between the Melville and Mumford’s lives are just as crucial to understanding them as their own “chronological arc[s].” For instance, he notes how Melville’s novel Redburn, with its vision of Liverpool, England, that balanced “misery and exhilaration,” influenced Lewis’s thinking about pre–New Deal planned “garden cities” and his writing on urban architecture. In another case, after having argued that Melville was sexually repressed, Mumford began having extramarital affairs to “avoid what he saw as Melville’s tragedy” and at one point told a lover,“Yillah is your right name,” a reference to the “damsel” from Melville’s Mardi. In shining a light on Mumford’s efforts during the “Melville Revival” of the mid-1900s, Sachs makes a strong case for the rediscovery of Mumford’s own writing: “Both Melville and Mumford, in their obsession with seeing the past in the present, remind us of the communal obligation to endure.” The result is a well-executed literary history. (June)