ABSTRACT
The profoundest tribute to Cervantes is that which other writers have paid him by imitation and emulation. It goes too deep to be altogether reducible to terms of conscious literary influence; it springs from the almost Homeric circumstances that made him the first to master a genre which - through that very process of mastery - has come to predominate in modern literature. Don Quixote is thus an archetype as well as an example, the exemplary novel of all time. No American author, however, can more fitly be compared with Cervantes than Herman Melville. The harsh schools in which the two men educated themselves were immeasurably far apart: a whaling ship, Melville boasted, was both Yale and Harvard to him. A comprehensive study of Melville's reading would reveal much about his writing, and even more about his thinking, especially during that later period when he seldom put his thoughts into his own words.
