Moby-Dick has been treated so much as the idiosyncratic work of an individual genius that any way we can find to recover its larger cultural sources is bound to seem especially valuable. Nevertheless, at some point an account of this book's origins has to acknowledge that it also derives from circumstances more immediately personal, some of which bear retelling here. Melville was born, in 1819, to a family prominent on both parents' sides. This family seemed to be renovating the foundations of its social position through Melville's father's business ventures. But this adventurous merchant-entrepreneur failed, then died, in Melville's early teens, leaving a family trained for prosperity to depend on the kindness of relatives. This wrenching dislocation had consequences for Melville's whole life attitude that we would be hard pressed to mark the limit of. They reveal themselves, very obviously, in his fourth book, Redburn, with its touchiness about...