“I have been building some shanties of houses …,” wrote Melville to Hawthorne, “and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays.”

Jeffrey Lawrence
Jeffrey Lawrence teaches modern American and Latin American literature and culture at Rutgers University. He also serves as the director of research for the Pittsfield-based public humanities project The Mastheads. He is the author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (Oxford University Press, 2018).