Endlessly pursued but ever elusive, Moby-Dick roams freely throughout the American imagination. A fathomless source for literary exploration, Melville's masterpiece has also inspired a stunning array of book illustrations, prints, comics, paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and even architectural designs. Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Unpainted to the Last illuminates this impressive body of work and shows how it opens up our understanding of both Moby-Dick and twentieth-century American art. The most continuously, frequently, and diversely illustrated of all American novels, Moby-Dick has attracted some remarkable book illustrators in Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, Garrick Palmer, Barry Moser, and Bill Sienkiewicz, among others represented here. It has also inspired extraordinary creations by such prominent artists as Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Sam Francis, Benton Spruance, Leonard Baskin, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Ellis, Ralph Goings, Seymour Lipton, Walter Martin, Tony Rosenthal, Richard Serra, and Theodore Roszak. The artists reflect in equal measure the novel's realistic (plot, character, natural history) and philosophical modes, its visual and visionary dimensions. Some, like the obsessed and haunted Gilbert Wilson, claim Moby-Dick as their "Bible." Still others view the novel as a touchstone for feminist, multicultural, and environmentalist themes, or mock its status as a cultural icon.

As a young man, Parker was a gifted artist, apple of his family’s eye, and a sought-after lover. Yet, on the verge of success, he walked away from it all. Twenty-two years later, now a respected physician but a loner, he learns he has inoperable cancer and will die within months. With the death sentence, Parker’s questions about his own life demand immediate answers—and resolution. Why did he give up art? Why is he so alone? And so, like a surgeon doing an autopsy, he cuts open his past and examines its parts, and in so doing, presents the reader with a vital and varied cast of characters. From his youth, we meet his wild friends and fellow art students, the woman he loves and the other women he sleeps with, the demanding mother and beleaguered father whose suffocating hopes for him he must flee, and his brilliant but scathing art teacher who risks everything for success. And then there’s Renny, the woman he’s only just met, who helps open his eyes to his past, and who may offer love and redemption—if he’ll let her

A corpus of emotions unsung and overheard. Unpainted is a deliberate attempt to minimize the gap between the reader’s understanding and the writer’s perception. This book hears and sings the emotions and habits of people that are in disregard. With this, I hope that you will take one or at least two righteous values with you home and make your life a little less coated, a little more UNPAINTED.