Clarel
An American divinity student in Jerusalem, unable either to hold his faith or to put it down, joins a party of pilgrims riding to the Dead Sea and back by way of the monastery at Mar Saba. The company argues for eighteen thousand lines of short couplets - a Yankee optimist, a bitter Swede, a Confederate exile turned mercenary - while the land itself offers nothing but stone. Melville rode that route in 1857 and paid for the printing nineteen years later, into complete silence.
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Closest analogues
- 49% · 11 shared
- 47% · 11 shared
- 45% · 10 shared
- 45% · 9 shared
- 43% · 10 shared
- 43% · 10 shared