Description
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in BiographyA double portrait of two of America's most influential writers that reveals the surprising connections between themand their uncanny relevance to our age of crisisUp from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American historythe novelist and poet Herman Melville (18191891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (18951990). Deftly cutting back and forth between the writers, Aaron Sachs reveals the surprising resonances between their lives, work, and troubled timesand their uncanny relevance in our own age of crisis. The author of Moby-Dick was largely forgotten for several decades after his death, but Mumford helped spearhead Melville's revival in the aftermath of World War I and the 19181919 flu pandemic, when American culture needed a forebear with a suitably dark vision. As Mumford's career took off and he wrote books responding
