Hester Blum
Hester Blum is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives and The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration, as well as several edited volumes, including a forthcoming edition of Moby-Dick for Oxford World’s Classics. Blum is past president of the Herman Melville Society, and her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship. She participated in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world’s last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet, in which Melville sailed.
Interviews with Hester Blum
The Best Herman Melville Books, recommended by Hester Blum
Today it is celebrated as one of America’s great novels, but when it came out, Moby-Dick was received with little acclaim and none of the commercial success of Herman Melville’s first book, Typee. Here, Hester Blum, Professor of English at Penn State, introduces the 19th century American novelist and recommends which books to read by and about him.
