From what little we know, Melville's oldest son Malcolm killed himself at the age of 18 in 1867. He had enlisted in a volunteer regiment, it being not long after the end of the Civil War, and he shot himself with the revolver that he kept under his

Ralph Waldo Emerson on why travel is a bad idea: "Traveling is a fool's paradise," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. He had a lot to say about the follies of travel in his essay Self-Reliance while Melville was lost in the South Seas... The soul is no

Abraham Lincoln: Thunder over Heaven Ta Chuang - the superior man does not tread upon paths that do not accord with established order. It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and

Joseph Smith Feng – thunder over the fire - the preacher and prophet... It is not given to every mortal to bring about a time of outstanding greatness and abundance. Only a born ruler of men is able to do it, because his will is directed to what is great. Such

Herman Melville - Lu the Wanderer Conventional explanations of Melville focus on his restless spirit. That's the gist of a well known diagnosis by "friend" Nathaniel Hawthorne: It is strange how he persists – and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before – in

Bennett is a fascinating figure. He arrived in Nauvoo in September of 1840 only a few months after Herman Melville passed by and he quickly assumed a powerful position in the young community. He also became an even more industrious practitioner of what he called "spiritual wifery" than

Lehi's Dream of the Tree of Life is one of the most beloved and interesting passages in The Book of Mormon, where it can be found in The First Book of Nephi, Chapter 8. The Tree of Life of course appears in Genesis 2-3 in the middle of

If Herman Melville had a patron saint it was this man, who lived from circa 125 AD – 180 AD), a "vile Atheist" whom Melville liked because they both enjoyed satirizing "tall tales." Melville is not given enough credit as a satirist; of course not many got

What to make of Herman Melville's Mardi... As one LDS scholar puts it, "That Melville could have used The Book of Mormon in writing Mardi is apparent." The island of Serenia in the novel could well be Nauvoo, or Joseph Smith’s utopian flights of fancy

* 1805 Birth of Joseph Smith * 1809 Birth of Abraham Lincoln * 1814 The Golden Pot. A Modern Fairytale by E.T.A. Hoffmann published * 1819 Birth of Herman Melville * 1820 Joseph Smith’s first vision; further visions through the 1820s * 1823 Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews published, reflecting widely

Mormonism - the religion of the Latter Day Saints - truly does have a claim to being the Great American Religion. Its success in the 1830s and 1840s means, after all, that imported Christianity was deemed insufficient. For Melville it was the Dutch Calvinism of his mother and the Unitarianism

Americans made connections early on between polygamists in the U.S. and the Ottoman rulers of Istanbul and their harems. The Mormons weren't the first polygamists, but after the revelations of the 1840's, they became the most prominent ones. What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that

In 1840, Nauvoo, Illinois, was on its way to becoming the 10th largest city in the U.S. as converts flooded in from Old and New England. Some estimates are that there were 20,000 people there by 1844, making Nauvoo the largest city in Illinois. After the disastrous events

Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities was Melville's most hated novel and it was his last commercially. This Gothic parody of 1852 inspired Melville's contemporaries to call him crazy - incest, fornication, madness, suicide! - and now it inspires new generations of literary critics to try to save

Are religious believers more prone to sex scandals than agnostics? It certainly seems that way. The last 100 years have seen many preachers and prophets brought down, too many to mention... Ask it another way: are religious believers more tempted to bring on the Apocalypse with their sexual behavior, like

Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was published on April Fools' Day in 1857 and unless you are fascinated by Melville, it's utterly unreadable. But it's my favorite. The setting is the Fidèle, a Mississippi steamboat, in an era when a boat or railroad

The Pearl of Great Price was a popular biblical image in the 19th century - even Melville used it in one of his unpublished poems ("the Little Pearl of Price") - and Hawthorne names Hester's daughter Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Long before this, the pearl

The meaning of Urim and Thummim in ancient Israelite mythology and LDS scripture is unclear, but that hasn't prevented volumes of learned speculation. Most explanations accept that the stones were used for divination. For example, they were put into a pouch and then pulled out to determine guilt

Chapter 42 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is cited these days in relation to the changing face of the United States, no longer a "white" nation. Yet white in Moby-Dick is also the color of life, a life that doesn't necessarily answer to humans. The&