The composer and performer Laurie Anderson was inspired by the novel to write a strange, cool, modern opera. Her Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick premiered in 1999. Thanks to KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic.
Music historian Stanley Crouch includes Moby-Dick in his lectures about jazz history at Juilliard, even though the novel was written over five decades before jazz developed. According to Crouch, Melville was an expert at improvisation. Produced by Ave Carrillo.
Studio 360 presents the world premiere of Moby-Dude from David Ives, the master of the short play. Mark Price plays a contemporary teenager who summarizes the great American novel for his English teacher...in two minutes flat. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
University of Kansas Professor Elizabeth Schultz is passionate about Moby-Dick. According to Schultz, Melville would have appreciated David Ives's short play Moby-Dude -- Melville was something of a prankster himself.
Playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) says that Moby-Dick had the single greatest impact on his own writing.
In the dark fall of 2001, images from Moby-Dick surfaced in the press, as a strange literary footnote to the most shocking event of the last half century. Producer Trey Kay speaks with Professors Andrew Delbanco and Samuel Otter about a metaphor that is undeniably powerful and impossible to capture.
Special Guest
Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor Edward Herrmann is our voice of Ishmael. Herrmann boasts an impressive career that spans more than 30 years in theater, film and television.
In 1986, legendary sculptor and painter Frank Stella defied Melville's instruction not to paint the White Whale, and then spent the next twelve years chasing an artistic obsession that Stella says nearly destroyed him. Produced by Leital Molad and Edward Lifson.
The great fantasy and science fiction master Ray Bradbury was still relatively unknown when the director John Huston tapped him to adapt Moby-Dick for the big screen. Bradbury tells Kurt Andersen how he channeled Herman Melville while writing the screenplay for the film, which starred Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Professor Elizabeth Schultz discusses her favorite passage from Moby-Dick, from the chapter titled The Grand Armada, where Ishmael and his companions are dragged into the center of a huge pod of whales, and find peace in the midst of the bloody terror of whale-hunting.
Composer Rinde Eckert's opera And God Created Great Whales is a meditation on creativity, memory, madness, and Moby-Dick. Produced by Jeff Lunden.
Studio 360's American Icons is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: great ideas brought to life.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
Public
Radio International and
WNYC New York Public Radio, and is funded in part by
Ken and Lucy Lehman, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
