Rockwell Kent Moby-Dick

Rockwell Kent, born on June 21, 1882, in Tarrytown, New York, was an artist and author who first came to prominence in the early twentieth century as a painter. Drawing inspiration from the austere power and beauty found in nature, Kent once wrote, “I don’t want petty self-expression. I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity.” After spending years living on Monhegan Island in Maine, he roamed from Minnesota to Newfoundland, Alaska, Vermont, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland, and Greenland. Wilderness (1920) was Kent’s first book, an edited and illustrated collection of his letters home from exploring Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska, with his nine-year-old son Rockwell during the winter of 1918–1919.

In 1926 Kent was approached by Chicago publisher R.R. Donnelley to illustrate an edition of Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast. Kent suggested Moby-Dick instead. Released in 1930 by Donnelley’s Lakeside Press imprint as a three-volume hardcover set with more than 270 of Kent’s stark black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings, the limited print run of 1,000 copies sold out immediately. The Lakeside Press edition was quickly followed by a single-volume version put out by Random House that became immensely popular. Building on the renewed interest in Herman Melville’s writing and Moby-Dick in particular, the Rockwell Kent edition cemented the novel’s place in the pantheon of American letters.

Kent continued to work throughout the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, illustrating numerous books—his own and those of other authors, including many classics—and contributing to two murals commissioned for the New Post Office headquarters building in Washington, D.C., in 1938. Kent was also very active in progressive politics, which put him at odds with the powers-that-be in 1950s America. The rise of Abstract Expressionism also eroded the popularity of his Social Realist artwork. In 1967 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, as his work was well-loved in the Soviet Union, and Kent had been outspoken about the need for better relations with the USSR and the dangers of nuclear war.

Kent died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-eight on March 13, 1971, leaving behind his third wife, Sally, and five surviving children, Rockwell III, Kathleen, Clara, Barbara, and Gordon. His legacy would endure and flourish as interest in his painting and illustration returned over the next four decades. In 2001, as part of a celebration of American illustrators, the U.S. Postal Service put out a stamp featuring one of Kent’s illustrations from Moby-Dick.